Artus Galiay
"In late August 2011, as I gathered in The George (the famous LSE pub) with fellow LSE-Sciences Po friends to celebrate submitting our Dissertations and the official end of our academic studies, I felt happy and nostalgic. Happy, because I was going to start working at the Financial Services Authority (FSA, the UK financial regulator) a couple of weeks later. But also nostalgic, because the two years I had spent studying the LSE-Sciences Po Double Degree in European Studies had been incredible from all points of view. On a personal level I had the opportunity to meet very nice and interesting people, true friends whose diversity of experiences and profiles were doubtlessly one of the most important aspects of this degree. Socially, the various associations/societies made my student life incredibly lively, as I was heavily involved in the LSE Students’ Union European Society. Academically, these two world-class universities offer an impressive breadth and depth of knowledge that only equals the quality of the teachers who provide it. Only in such places will you hear a teacher start his course by saying, “When I was advising the Chinese government…” Culturally, this degree condenses two very different approaches to academic studies, developed on both sides of the English Channel and which appear contradictory but are in fact complementary – despite having been at war for 900 of the past 1,000 years.
The skills I developed at Sciences Po and LSE allowed me to secure a job relatively quickly. LSE’s flexibility in allowing me to choose courses outside my department (in finance) allowed me to develop my professional profile as I intended to. As the FSA has been split into two new regulatory bodies, I now work at the Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA) – the part of the Bank of England that supervises banks. My role consists in providing analytical support to the supervisors of big banks on international macroeconomic and financial risks. I find my job extremely interesting, and feel very grateful to both universities for helping me secure it. I will soon be going on secondment from the Bank of England to the European Central Bank (ECB) for 6 months, to analyse the ECB’s monetary policy transmission mechanism. This new step in my career only confirms my view that Sciences Po and LSE provide a very powerful boost to a world of opportunities."
Alumnus 2009-2011
Andrew Bishop
"I completed the double master's degree in European Studies between the London School of Economics and Sciences Po in 2007-2009. The aspect I most enjoyed in pursuing this curriculum was its flexible character. Being professionally interested in political risk, I was often offered the chance to study a range of topics above and beyond the European Union's immediate institutional horizon. For example, one of my favourite courses at LSE dealt with European security and the ambiguous relations between overlapping security architectures in the post-Cold War era. Another focused on elements of continuity and novelty in Soviet and post-Soviet foreign policies. All in all, I found the level of courses, professors, and students stimulating, and the two schools' atmospheres forward-looking and open. This was a fresh reminder of my undergraduate studies at the Johns Hopkins University, as US-like openness had always been particularly important to me.
Throughout my academic studies, my view of academia was quite independent as I continuously sought to complement it with personal and professional endeavours such as freelance writing and internships. I found both the LSE and Sciences Po to be fertile grounds for such activities. Today, I work as an analyst for the World Economic Forum's Strategic Risk Foresight Team, which conducts global risk analysis and scenario planning on a variety of industry and regional issues. The World Economic Forum, best known for its Annual Meeting in Davos, is also a year-round hub for creating ties between public, private, and non-governmental players around thought leadership and societal development projects. In the words of one famous LSE alumnus, "For every photo-op with a celebrity […], there is a corporate citizenship deal struck that goes largely unnoticed -- but important to the people on the ground thousands of miles from Davos who will actually benefit." The work is fascinating and I benefit from my learnings at Sciences Po and LSE on a daily basis. In fact, several of my colleagues are fellow alumni of both schools. I feel studying at LSE and Sciences Po – two schools with highly diverse student bodies – was a great preparation for working in such a multicultural and international environment, where dozens of nationalities interact in multiple formal and informal working languages."
Alumnus 2007-2009
Irene de Lorenzo-Cáceres Cantero
"When I applied for the LSE–Sciences Po Double Degree in European Studies in 2008, I was a convinced young European who wanted to contribute her best to the European Union, especially through the creation of a true European identity. Nonetheless, in the course of my first year at Sciences Po, my academic and professional horizons were enlarged thanks to the contact with inspiring scholars such as Eiko Thielemann, who introduced me to a whole new topic which I soon became completely passionate about: international migration. In this regard, the flexibility of the European Institute's MSc programmes allowed me to specialise in international and EU migration policies during my year at LSE, with a focus on the human rights and development issues at stake. This shift was also evident in my extracurricular engagement at Sciences Po and LSE: whereas I fully participated in the vibrant student life of both schools, it was in London that I became involved with student societies like Amnesty International to help defend the rights of immigrants, refugees and asylum-seekers. The combination of my theoretical knowledge of EU migration policy and practical experience of human rights advocacy at grassroots level allowed me to coordinate a petition campaign launched by the Brussels-based NGO 'December 18' to urge EU Member States to ratify the UN Migrant Workers Convention immediately after finishing my dissertation at LSE in August 2010.
In January 2011 I moved to New York and started interning at the Permanent Mission of Spain to the United Nations, with the main purpose of getting a migration-related job within the UN System. I owe the Double Degree for having widened the scope of my professional ambitions from the European to the global level, as well as having allowed me to find a new overall direction for my career: giving migration policies worldwide a more humane face, one of the main challenges which the international community will be confronted with in the coming decades."
Alumna 2008-2010