A firsthand account from the Class of 2026
About Bard College and the MAGS program
For over 165 years, Bard College has combined the rigor of liberal arts education with a genuinely global mission. Its MA in Global Studies, known as MAGS, is a full-year program based in New York City, where students pursue interdisciplinary coursework, complete internships at leading international organizations, and build the analytical depth that careers in diplomacy, policy, and global affairs demand.
This year, the Class of 2026 marked the end of that journey at a commencement ceremony on Bard’s historic Hudson Valley campus. Mustafa Mayar, one of this year’s graduates, was there and wrote about what he saw.
A graduation unlike any other
By Mustafa Mayar, MAGS Class of 2026
May brought the MAGS program to a close with a graduation weekend up in the Hudson Valley at Bard’s Annandale campus. For the first time, the MAGS cohort joined other master’s programs for a dedicated ceremony at the Fisher Center, the Frank Gehry-designed performing arts building that sits on the campus like a piece of folded silver. After a year of coursework, internships, late night studies, and a steady stream of papers, walking into a Gehry building to pick up a diploma felt like a fittingly dramatic way to close things out.
The last few weeks before commencement had been the usual mix of final assignments, goodbyes, and the realization that this was the last stretch the whole cohort would spend in one place.
One year, many directions
There’s a particular rhythm to a master’s program. You spend a year with the same group, in the same classrooms, reading the same material, then it ends, and everyone moves on to something different. Even after a year of the same syllabus and the same city, recent graduates are leaving with very different ideas about what to do with what they learned. Some are staying in the US, some are heading home, and others are still choosing between a few directions. The cohort itself is the best way to see this, so I asked a few recent grads where their heads are right now, and the answers were as varied as you’d expect.
The graduates: where they’re headed
Labiba, originally from Bangladesh, is still figuring out her plans and is mostly thinking about internships in the US for now. If those don’t pan out, she’s open to heading home and looking for a university job, possibly in teaching. She’s keeping things deliberately open, which feels reasonable at a moment when most people end up somewhere they didn’t quite plan for anyway.
Andrea, from Myanmar, is looking further out and managing several things at once. Down the line she’s interested in doing further graduate work in the US, and in the nearer term she’s drawn to NGO and humanitarian roles in Asia. On top of all that, she’s planning to keep running her small business and to take on a bigger role in the family business back home.
Mariam, from Georgia, is moving into international affairs with a clear regional focus. She’s building a career in research and analysis on China, Russia, and global politics, and her time living in China and her language skills feed straight into it. Her strongest interest is in international security and defense, especially the policy research and writing side, though she’d also consider strategic communications and public engagement work.
Said, who is from Tajikistan, has the next decade fairly well mapped out. He’s planning to stay in the US for another year as a communications professional and is currently applying for policy jobs at international organizations. After that he expects to head back to Tajikistan, work there for a while, and apply for a PhD in political science somewhere in the next five to ten years.
Eman, who comes from Pakistan, is taking a more exploratory approach for now. She’s applying to a mix of internships and jobs while keeping an eye on PhD programs further down the line, and she’s in no rush to commit to any single track. A program like MAGS attracts people who think in long arcs, and long arcs don’t always sort themselves out by commencement weekend.
The rest of the cohort falls somewhere across this range, weighing further study, immediate work, returning home, or another year or two in the US before deciding.
What holds the cohort together
What holds the group together, underneath all the different plans, is something a liberal arts education is built to instill: the sense that your work should answer to something larger than your own advancement. People are taking jobs and applying to programs, but when they talk about what they’re actually after, it keeps coming back to communities, to institutions, and to closing the gap between how things are supposed to work and how they actually do.
My own next chapter
As for me, one of this year’s MAGS graduates, I’m taking a much-needed break after a few intense years. My undergrad spanned four countries across three continents, and I went straight into MAGS without much of a pause, so the idea of staying put for a while genuinely appeals to me. Over the summer I’m working at a New York state agency, learning how policy actually moves through the machinery of government at the state level. My longer-term plan is to work toward federal policymaking, where the questions I care about play out on a much larger stage. Getting there will take patience, and after the last few years, that’s one thing I feel ready for.
Looking back
Looking back at the year, the real value of MAGS was in how it sharpened the questions students arrived with. People came in with rough ideas about what they cared about, and over two semesters those ideas got pulled apart, argued over, and rebuilt with a lot more behind them. Some of that is the faculty, some of it is New York City working as a second classroom, but a lot of it is the cohort itself, a group of people from very different countries and disciplines who had to actually listen to one another. As this year’s graduates move on to whatever comes next, they take that hard-won clarity with them. Future cohorts will get the same, and the network of people the program builds only grows from here.
Interested in the MAGS program?
If Mustafa’s story resonates with you, the MA in Global Studies at Bard College might be your next step. Study in New York City, intern at leading international organizations, and graduate with the clarity and network to build a career that actually matters.