By Madeleine Polk
This past January, I had the opportunity to visit Andhra Pradesh, India, as a part of the Winter Institute in System Dynamics for Rural Development, a course in the Brown School of Social Work. I had the chance to work with students in social work and public health, staff from the Foundation for Ecological Security, and natural resource dependent tribal populations to understand the barriers to sustained agricultural livelihoods in dry land areas of India. Utilizing principles of Community-Based System Dynamics and Group Model Building, we conceptualized the problems facing the community in Nallaguttapalle Thanda, a Sugali tribal village in Southeast India. Over the course of our fieldwork and modeling, we built reference modes, behavior over time graphs, causal loop diagrams, and simulation models to identify leverage points to the problems facing this community in Andhra. By the end of the two-week institute, we developed many insights around the barriers to sustainable agricultural livelihoods. Many insights centered around the dependence on income from commercial crop production and the relationship between diminished agricultural yield and increased reliance on livestock. We will be working in coming weeks to refine our simulation model such that we can identify more leverage points to the problems facing Nallaguttapalle Thanda.
The most valuable part of my time in India centered on the village community’s response to our work over the two-week period. After presenting the final model to them in a village meeting, we received incredible feedback. While they knew the story of the problems facing them in recent years, they had never considered the systems-level perspective to understand the relationships between all of the problems they faced. It was so rewarding and exciting to hear them talking about using systems thinking and modeling tools in the future to identify different solutions to problems they faced.
My experience as a participant in the Brown School of Social Work’s Winter Institute in System Dynamics for Rural Development was the most important and influential one of my time as an undergraduate at Washington University. In the years I have spent here, I have taken classes in everything from Social Entrepreneurship and Management to Cultural Anthropology and Swahili. Within the engineering school, I have shifted from an energy focus in Chemical Engineering to a focus on System Dynamics modeling within Systems Engineering. I could not have found a more challenging and satisfying culminating experience than my time I spent in India with the Winter Institute. I learned more about working in interdisciplinary groups, project conceptualization and management, and System Dynamics modeling within these two weeks than I cumulatively learned in my prior coursework. My experience in India will be the one I remember most fondly and apply most regularly to my work as a consultant after graduation. I am incredibly grateful to the School of Engineering and Applied Science for providing me with such amazing financial support for my trip with the Winter Institute. At this point, I cannot imagine my outlook on my time as an undergraduate without this experience.