Tamika Camille Gauvin

Tamika Camille Gauvin is a candidate for the Master of City Planning from the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at M.I.T.

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Full Bio

Tamika Camille Gauvin is a candidate for the Master of City Planning from the
Department of Urban Studies and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology. Tamika holds a B.A. in Economics from the University of Chicago
and worked in Information Technology Training at Morgan Stanley. She is making
a career change into urban planning where she is interested in doing work
related to maintaining and promoting affordable housing in urban
revitalizations.

The Baltimore Red Line: Maximizing Benefits and Minimizing Impact

An account of planning for the Red Line Project in Baltimore.

Doing the Conference Circuit

The semester has kicked into high gear and I am drowning in a sea of reading, written assignments,map-making, and special projects. Once in a while, I manage to emerge and dock (I know, enough of the nautical metaphors) at a lecture – or as in the last couple of weeks – at aconference. It is great to stepout of academia once in a while and hear what is going on in the realworld. I had the opportunity to attend two conferences over the past month. One of them – <a href="http://cityfrombelow.org/main">The City from Below</a> Conference – I attended this weekend when I returned home to Baltimore for spring break.

Plugging into Planning: Baltimore and New Orleans

I am enjoying the last day of my Independent Activities Period (IAP) – the period after winter break in which all students at MIT can take one of many non-credit or for-credit course offerings at MIT, set up a winter externship, or just do nothing. This amounts to six weeks of bliss!

A Semester in Review, New Year Resolutions, Building Blocks and Toy Cars

In the dawn of the New Year, I cannot help but reflect on my pivotal moments in 2008, and look forward to 2009. I wrapped up – no, survived – my first semester in the Master of City Planning program at MIT. I am being a little dramatic here, but the program is really very rigorous. One thing I learned was that with such a rigorous program there is no need to make it unnecessarily more challenging. When I arrived in Cambridge, I was very excited to be in school again – I graduated from college ten years ago – and I registered for five and a half classes. Three and a half of the classes were required and two were electives. It was recommended that we take only one elective, but I was psyched and I was going to take MIT by storm!

This Couldn’t Have Happened at a Better Time

The United States has been reborn. The election of Barack Obama has put – or reintroduced – the United States to the world stage as a beacon of hope for all people. We have proven that we believe and embody the ideals of equality and equal opportunity and that these ideals are the right of every citizen and not just a few. More importantly, this election is a ray of hope for our nation. We advanced the fight against racism to elect the first black president of the United States. Barack Obama’s election also gives hope to Americans as we witness and feel the stinging affects of the economic and housing crises, the energy crisis and two wars.

Tamika Camille Gauvin