CEU Alumna Marta Matosek Shares Her Reflections and Photos as roshanmarta

Alumna Marta Matosek (MAPP ’15) has had an interesting career so far as an international development professional. It is a career that has taken her to the Bureau for Reconstruction and Development in Afghanistan, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies in Hungary, Coffey/Tetra Tech company in Poland, and to the United Kingdom where she is currently a programme officer for the Overseas Development Institute. In her free time, Marta is also involved in a regional research project on tax treaty negotiations between Central European countries and developing countries.

Marta looks back on the “short but very productive academic year” that she spent at CEU as a highly rewarding time. She especially enjoyed the Macroeconomics and Public Finance classes that Professor Lajos Bokros taught. “As a practitioner, he was able to give us deep insight into the dilemmas that governments face when deciding about a given policy,” she remembers. Marta notes that she and her classmates never missed a class – despite the fact that they took place on Fridays at 9 am! She also appreciated Professor Dan Large’s “exploratory and interdisciplinary approach” to teaching his course on South-South cooperation.

During her stay in Kabul in 2012, Marta launched a blog in which she writes in English and Polish (and publishes some stunning pictures) about a wide array of topics including why international aid may be contributing to violence against women in Afghanistan. Marta says that she started the blog to reflect on her experiences working in the aid sector and of Afghan culture. Writing the blog was also a good way to spend her very limited free time. She notes that Kabul was “an increasingly insecure environment” and offered only “limited leisure options.” After she left Kabul, Marta decided to keep her blog going so she could share her thoughts and images as she traveled to other corners of the world.