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Maryruth Belsey-Priebe, a specialist in gender and climate change, was invited as a guest speaker on April 19, 2024, in the Professional Workshop course held by Dr. Astha Chadha, who has previously worked with the guest speaker at Pacific Forum’s Women, Peace and Security programme. 

The guest lecture dealt with three main themes:

1.How to navigate the dream career in an ever-expanding pool of career choices and how to build expertise in newer fields such as climate change policy or human security and infrastructure, disaster response, gender, and peace etc.

2.How to ensure personal growth and motivation while working in a job of your choice, and how to never lose hope and patience if you encounter challenges at work, such as a devaluation in career, criticism at work or devastating situations.  

3.Why diversity and inclusion are really important at workplace, and even more important as a mindset to succeed professionally and socially. 

The students engaged with the guest speaker, asking Ms. Maryruth about why she chose the current job, her experience being an entrepreneur versus serving as a director of a programme at a think tank, how to develop technical skills while studying at the university, how to deal with mental health, and indicators for the right time to switch a career and how to build expertise in a new field. 

Ms. Maryruth also provided mentorship advice to the students for career guidance in policy-related careers in think tanks and government, as well as in corporate policy-related research, and advised students to seek personal feedback from mentors. 

The students then engaged in a mock disaster response activity where they took charge of different government departments during a natural disaster emergency simulation. The session ended with students presenting their gender-sensitive disaster response plans and strategies, followed by feedback from Ms. Maryruth Belsey-Priebe and Dr. Astha Chadha on each disaster response plan.