Madina knows the built environment is changing and wants to be part of that change

My path to the Connected Environments MSc

I didn’t arrive at UCL through the conventional route. My background is in Business Administration and Project Management; the world of strategy decks, stakeholder alignment, and delivery frameworks. Not circuits. Not code. Not sensors. And yet, here I am, in one of London’s most forward-thinking labs, building IoT devices from scratch and arguing about products ethics over coffee, technology adoption, and scalability in urban environments.

The honest answer to “why Connected Environments?” starts not with technology, but with a feeling I couldn’t shake: that the world was restructuring itself around forces I didn’t fully understand yet, and that staying on the outside of that restructuring wasn’t an option.

Why UCL. Why study at the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis

CASA, the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, sat at the intersection of every discipline I cared about: urban systems, data science, design, and policy.

The Connected Environments MSc course is built around a philosophy that immediately resonated: Sense. Deploy. Communicate. It’s not about the gadget. It’s about what the gadget reveals, and what you do with that knowledge.

The fact that the course is run as a living lab, and places like Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park as a real-world testing environment, was the deciding factor. I wasn’t going to learn smart cities from a textbook. I was going to learn them by walking through one, instruments in hand.

The gap I wanted to close

In project management, you learn to ask: what is the system, and how do its parts interact?

That question, applied to urban environments, is exactly what Connected Environments answers. IoT sensors, AI-driven data platforms, digital twins of buildings and parks, these are no longer abstract concepts. They are the infrastructure of the next decade. And someone must understand both the strategic “why” and the technical “how.”

That gap, between the people who build the technology and the people who decide where it should go, is precisely where I want to operate.

What I didn’t expect on the course

I expected the technical challenge. I didn’t expect how quickly the course would make that challenge feel natural. Within weeks, the cohort, architects, economists, engineers, law & business graduates, and artists were all wiring sensors together, arguing about data ethics, and presenting digital twin prototypes to real practitioners. The diversity of the room is the point.

Also Hearing Josef Hargrave from Arup talk about Strategic Foresight, how to build strategy that holds up across multiple possible futures, felt like the business education I’d had, turbocharged. And Visiting Connected Places Catapult and seeing how national IoT strategy is shaped, how it must balance people, planet, and prosperity, made the stakes of this work viscerally clear.

The advantage of my business management background

My background in business isn’t a disadvantage in this programme. If anything, it’s an asset, because the hardest problem in connected environments isn’t building the sensor. It’s knowing why it should exist, who it serves, and how to communicate its value to the people who fund it, govern it, and live alongside it.

That’s the work. And I’m only getting started.

All images provided by Madina Diallo