During Moubarak Jeje’s last semester of his undergraduate career at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in Spring 2022, he chose to write his final policy brief about Austin, Texas for Urban and Regional Planning 215: Welcome to Your Urban Future.
One year later, Jeje graduated with his master’s degree after completing the one-year Electrical Computer Engineering Professional Program and is planning to move to Austin and work for Tactical Computing Laboratories.
“We got to choose the city and write about a problem that it’s having and how they’re solving that problem. Coincidentally I chose Austin. Maybe in the back of my head Austin was always my destination,” Jeje said with a laugh.
As an undergraduate with computer science and computer engineering majors, Jeje also had an interest in urban planning and city design that motivated him to pursue the Welcome to Your Urban Future class.
This class is an extension of UniverCity Alliance’s (UCA) mission to connect a growing community of people on campus looking to improve their communities. UCA is a network of leaders from across campus that serves as the “front door” for local governments to access resources at UW-Madison.
“I came in expecting that we would talk about road planning, zoning – the very physical parts of city designs,” Jeje said. “Another part of the class was the politics behind how cities are designed and how communities work together.”
This inspired Jeje to pay more attention to Madison’s local politics and elections.
“I’m more involved and I planned to get more involved with politics because I realized the importance of that from the class,” Jeje said. “I realized that local voices have a lot more power on the city scope than they do federally, so I have been trying to participate more in my community.”
During the second semester of his master’s program, Jeje took Interdisciplinary Engineering 303 Applied Leadership Competencies in Engineering to hone his leadership and interpersonal skills. His final project – analyzing workforce development strategies for the city of Portage in Columbia County (a UCA community partner) – was fitting as he decided where to move after graduation.
“I was interested in workforce development right away because the encompassing goal of the project was to see what motivates people to move closer to a city or town and where I am right now in life is that exact same consideration,” Jeje said. “It was fortuitous that it worked out that way.”
He and his classmates ultimately made recommendations for Portage across six themes that included a cultural community center, downtown revitalization, pedestrian safety and alternative mobility, tourism, social media, and housing cost alleviation.
Throughout these two distinct UCA experiences in the academic fields of urban and regional planning and engineering, Jeje discovered another connection.
While researching Austin, he analyzed how the city responded to local protests following the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Jeje noticed that Austin decided to reallocate funding from law enforcement to community services.
“That connected to my leadership class because one of our subjects in that class was equitable leadership and full representative leadership … in different situations leaders have to be aware of the impact their decisions make and receive input from a representative selection of stakeholders,” Jeje said. “I thought it was really cool how it connected that way and how equity is a part of all of those different spheres.”