Thanks to an invitation from political science department chair Professor Rick Hermann to CCWA, a club in which I participate, I was able to go and listen to two foreign policy experts, Jessica Tuchman Matthews, and Richard Nephew speak about the Iran Deal (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action). Jessica is a senior fellow for the Carnegie Endowment for Peace, and Richard worked in the White House and was a negotiator during the Iran talks. He now works for the Brookings Institute. This event was in a conference room in the Student Union, so it was very intimate and we were able to ask these experts a lot of questions.
This event was fascinating to me because both of the speakers have had career paths that I hope to duplicate some day. Additionally, I have done a lot of class projects and papers involving Iran, even acting as the Iranian president during a simulation game in Dr. Hermann’s Strategies of War and Peace class. I learned a lot about Iran’s domestic politics, and the implications of the JCPOA on both Iran and the rest of the world. The smallness of the event also gave me some extra time at the end to network and introduce myself to the speakers.
