IPS Insights: International Association of Public Transport Summit

Have you ever wished you had support to take advantage of a professional or career development opportunity that lies outside the scope of your academic research? The UCSB Individualized Professional Skills (IPS) Program is designed to help graduate students and postdoctoral scholars fill in the funding gaps for pursuing opportunities that support your professional development in a variety of career trajectories.

IPS Insights: In our series, "IPS Insights," previous awardees share about their IPS-funded experiences in short informational videos. This week's featured video is by Ariana Salas Castillo, a PhD student in Political Science.

Ariana used the IPS funds to attend the International Association of Public Transport Summit. Watch the video to learn more!

In Ariana's Words: What I Learned

"In June 2023, I attended the 2023 International Association of Public Transport (UITP) summit in Barcelona. The UITP organizes a global summit each year (it was interrupted by the pandemic), which gathers a wide range of participants: from industry authorities and operators, to consultants, academicians and exhibitors. This year, 2,700 people from 110 countries attended, there were 423 speakers, 337 exhibitors from 41 countries, and 17,300 exhibition visits. I thoroughly enjoyed, learned, made progress in my dissertation, and made contacts at this summit. The summit was organized in such a way that there were plenty of spaces to meet people and network: either at the coffee breaks, lunch or at the welcome and concluding dinners. I got to meet fellow graduate students writing their dissertation on topics related to public transportation, as well as professionals from NGOs and international organizations who do the kind of research and analysis on public transportation that I am interested in. In this regard, it has been hard for me to find research and organizations working on public transportation in the developing world, where data is scarce. Moreover, most of the research I have found is focused on the technical or financial issues of public transportation. My question and my analysis are political ones. And this has been probably the highlight of this summit for my own purposes. I encountered lots of people working on informal public transportation in Africa, Asia, and Latin America and diving in the political aspects of it. I will even join the UITP informal transportation group as a result of this summit! My next steps are to follow up on some new contacts I obtained in this summit. For instance, next week I will be interviewing the UITP delegate for Latin America. This interview will be helpful for my dissertation, but also as I prepare to enter the job market in a non-academic job."

IPS Program Overview

Awards up to $1000 are granted to eligible UCSB graduate students and postdoctoral scholars from any discipline who wish to individually tailor their career paths with outside professional development opportunities. The purpose of the IPS program is to help grad students and postdocs take greater agency in their own career path by funding exploration of a range of professional development opportunities across a variety of career and skill interests.

The IPS Program is a collaboration between the Professional Development Series at the Center for Science and Engineering Partnerships; Graduate Division; the Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion; UCSB Innovation and Entrepreneurship Initiative and CNSI Technology Incubator; Career Services; UCSB's divisional deans; and external donors. Learn more about the program here!