MPP student Zachary Blackburn and his team of fellow graduate students’ proposal won the 2015 Network of Schools of Public Policy, Affairs and Administration (NASPAA) Student Simulation Competition. Blackburn and fellow MPP student Jenni Jung traveled to the University of Maryland School of Public Policy to join other graduate students from around the Mid-Atlantic region. The national competition was held on Feb. 28, 2015, at five regional sites across the country. 

These teammates showed exemplary understanding of health care challenges and current policy concerns and showed a mastery of the technical simulation. They also displayed sophisticated reasoning to craft composite policies that substantially benefit health care for the long-term which have maximum potential to be implemented in a politically charged world.
 
Additionally, the team understood the technical model, but instead of trying to obtain the highest score on the model, they aligned their thought process with stakeholder concerns and the current policy environment to affect actual change. They made sophisticated tradeoffs that would allow their policies to be organizationally and politically feasible.

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