Nicolás Sánchez Rodriguez Envisions Public Policy Career Path

Nicolás Sánchez Rodriguez Envisions Public Policy Career Path

First-year graduate student Nicolás Sánchez Rodriguez is combining his diverse academic background into a truly interdisciplinary Romance Studies education.

As a student on the Latin American studies track, Sánchez Rodriguez is planning on focusing on social issues in his home country of Colombia.

“I would like to try to combine an approach from the humanities and an approach from economics to try to understand the political and economic context of Colombia in the last 30 years,” he said.

Sánchez Rodriguez has a background in industrial engineering, operations research and finance, but has since branched out to study literature and cultural studies.

“In recent years I've been trying to bring those branches of my studies together, and so the interdisciplinary approach of the Romance Studies Department and Duke's institutional structure encourages and facilitates this kind of project,” he said. “Being a part of the University Scholars Program is also a great motivation for me to persist in this trans-disciplinary approach even if it's not always clear to me how I can do it.”

To combine his interests, Sánchez Rodriguez has been taking classes on literary theory and political economy. He added that Duke’s atmosphere has been conducive to his diverse academic pursuits.

 “I did my masters in Bogotá, which is a gigantic city of about 7 billion people. It took me more than an hour to get from my house to the university, and now I live five minutes from campus and have all the resources here that I need,” he said.

Studying Colombia from outside of the country has also allowed Sánchez Rodriguez to understand it from a different perspective.

“There are not many foreigners studying in Colombia, so you only get the Colombian view on most of the issues,” he said. “In my classes here at Duke, there are people from a lot of different parts of the world, so everyone has a different view on different issues.”

In his spare time, Sánchez Rodriguez enjoys playing tennis and squash. As a University and J.B. Duke Scholar, he also mentors undergraduates outside of his own field.

Sánchez Rodriguez is currently considering applying to the master in economics or public policy programs at Duke in the next year to expand his knowledge outside of Romance Studies.

After completing his studies at Duke, he said he hopes to do research on public policy in Colombia at a think tank or a non-governmental organization.

“I have the goal of projecting my career towards a position in which perhaps I could have one foot in the academic sphere and the other one in public policy assessment and execution in Colombia,” he said.