Learning and Leading for Global Human Well-Being
The University of Pennsylvania, known as Penn, is a highly selective and top-ranked Ivy League university that is located on a beautiful urban campus in historic Philadelphia. The Penn International Master of Public Administration, known as the Penn I-MPA, is an exciting, innovative, skills-based graduate degree program that is expressly dedicated to improving global human well-being by professionally educating, nurturing, and networking present and future problem-solving leaders.
The Penn I-MPA takes only one academic year and nine courses to complete. It is an academically cutting-edge cohort model program (all I-MPA degree candidates take all I-MPA courses together and participate in numerous extra-curricular learning experiences together) led by a distinctively interdisciplinary, multinational, and multilingual team of world-class scholars and noted leaders in government, business, and the nonprofit sector who teach, advise, mentor, and inspire our students.
I-MPA degree candidates are educationally equipped and professionally empowered through five interlocking program components, four required and one optional:
- Curriculum: Nine well-integrated courses that culminate in advanced individual research and writing: a capstone paper and a group-organized, class-wide capstone project.
- Languages: Proficiency in English and proficiency in any one or more of the following four languages: Hindi*, Mandarin, Spanish, or Swahili.
- Extra-curricular activities: Extra-curricular experiences including special events and distinguished speakers series.
- Advising: Year-long, robust, individualized academic advising and professional mentoring.
- Paid fellowships: During spring break, top-performing I-MPA students may be eligible to apply for an all-expenses-paid, faculty-led service-learning fellowship trip to New Orleans, Louisiana. As Joseph P. Tierney Fellows of the Penn Partnership for Innovation, Cross-Sector Collaboration, Leadership, and Organization (PICCLO), students tour the Crescent City, meet top business, government, and nonprofit leaders, and learn first-hand about the public-private partnerships that were essential to the region's human, physical, and financial recovery process in the decades following Hurricane Katrina. In the summer immediately following graduation, I-MPA students who served as leaders of the group-organized, class-wide capstone project in I-MPA 6095 may be eligible for Penn Fox Leadership International (FLI) alumni service-learning awards of up to $5,000.
The I-MPA program starts on August 24, 2024, with new student orientation. Classes start with the first semester on August 27, 2024, and finish at the end of the second semester on April 30, 2025.
*The I-MPA program also accepts two related local languages as evidence of language proficiency: Bengali and Urdu.
