Student of the Month

Andrew is a senior in Public Policy with a concentration in U.S. Foreign Policy and International Development. His favorite subjects include development economics, political philosophy, American history, and econometrics.

 

At Stanford, he has helped form the Stanford Political Union and worked with Stanford in Government to create more opportunities for students to engage in public service. He has also been involved with the Public Service Student Advisory Board, the Committee for Undergraduate Standards and Policy, research with the Political Science department, and the Haas Center's Impact Abroad trip to Bolivia. He was abroad for most of his junior year, studying the history of economics at Oxford and volunteering independently in Cape Town for a social enterprise incubator.

 

Last summer he interned with the St. Louis Equity Fund, where he helped form a subsidiary that will seek certification as a community development financial institution through a program at the Department of the Treasury. His plans for life after Stanford remain unclear.

Raffi Mardirosian was born and raised in San Rafael, California. He is a senior majoring in Public Policy and Economics. Raffi is learning Arabic, and studied in Doha and Dubai on a Stanford Overseas Seminar entitled "Project Finance, Urban Development, and Construction in the Middle East." He attended Stanford in Washington last spring and worked in financial intelligence at the U.S. Treasury.

 

Other work experience includes monetary policy research at the Reserve Bank of India in Mumbai, India, high-energy astrophysics research at the Yerevan Physics Institute in Yerevan, Armenia, and infrastructure investment banking at BNP Paribas in New York, NY. He also served as a research assistant to Professors Stephen Stedman in CISAC and Ryan Orr in CRGP (Collaboratory for Research on Global Projects).

 

At Stanford, Raffi has been active in the Stanford Blyth Fund, the Stanford Political Union, Stanford in Government, the ASSU Nominations Commission, and the Stanford Board of Trustees. He enjoys playing squash, sailing, hiking, camping, traveling and spontaneous adventures. Raffi will be attending Harvard Business School two years post-graduation.

Rebecca Schindel is a senior majoring in Public Policy with a concentration in International Development and Growth Policies. Her favorite classes were "Poverty and Policies in Developing Economies" and "Regulation and Competition in Less Developed Economies."

 

Rebecca spent the summer after her sophomore year conducting research in Haryana, India through the Stanford Center for International Development Gunn Research Program. The data she collected will serve as the basis for her Honors thesis on the relationship between female foeticide and savings preferences in rural India. Rebecca attended Stanford in Washington in the spring of 2009, where she interned in the South Asia Region Sustainable Development Department of The World Bank. 

 

This past summer, Rebecca interned at an economic consulting firm in San Francisco and participated in the America in Vietnam Bing Overseas Seminar. She is currently serving as Stanford in Government's co-Chair for 2009-2010. Rebecca is a Public Policy Peer Advisor.