When I graduated the Evergreen MPA program in 2010 seeing the value in an MPA degree wasn’t the easiest thing for me and many in my cohort. At the time, I was a project manager for a small non-profit and the majority of people in my cohort either had a similar job to me or worked for the government in some capacity. Governments had virtually no money and every week someone was coming to class either laid off or furloughed. In all honesty, it was a pretty depressing time to learn about doing the government’s business.
My reasons for joining the MPA were embarrassingly simple; I liked politics, was an Evergreen alumni, and was in a fairly listless period of my life. There several people like me in our program, but I always admired the ones who had government jobs and were sincerely trying to learn new skills to enhance both their careers and the impact they had on the citizens they served. I enjoyed learning the theories, case studies, and history of public administration, but I found it tremendously difficult to discover a touchstone which would enable me to apply what I was learning into a real, meaningful context outside academia. As with many things in life, this would only emerge with hindsight.
Immediately after graduating I fell victim to the poor economy and was laid off. Luckily, my boss was able to connect me with a firm in Indonesia which needed a project director for six months. My background is in education and this was an education development project; I’ve worked overseas previously for a number of years so the location wasn’t, admittedly, as intimidating for me as it may have been for others. I’m still consulting in education overseas and I’ve found what I learned in the MPA program to be extremely valuable despite the fact I’m working in the private sector and in areas completely divorced from the American context entailed in most of what I learned.
To me, the secret value of the MPA was developing a comprehensive definition of what it means to “serve the public”. More precisely, almost anything done in the world impacts citizens (or customers, clients, members, etc.) and keeping that always in mind pays tremendous dividends when doing program design or pitching ideas around. I suppose it’s really a matter of “keeping your eye on the ball” and never forgetting that citizens are always the end user of whatever plan is being developed.
My job requires me to do a broad range of activities: lecturing, writing papers, running workshops for teachers, meeting policy-makers, project planning, and even designing learning spaces for institutions. I’ve done this now for four years and in several different countries throughout the Middle East and South East Asia. In every circumstance I’ve found that paying attention to citizens’ needs at the ground level gives me valuable insight and wins support for whatever I’m doing. At the higher level paying attention to the citizen’s needs distinguishes me from 90% of what anyone else is thinking about; I believe being different (and patient) pays off in the end, particularly when dealing in countries where developing citizenry is a crucial aspect towards attaining national goals.
I realize the simplicity of the idea of “citizens matter”, but I was shocked at the reality of how, frankly, primitive the thoughts on this subject were for most of the people with whom I engage. When someone is receiving an education there is a lot of forgivable navel gazing. It’s hard to see how your thoughts develop and are unique when you are sitting in the same room with thirty other people who have read the same books and writing papers on the same topic. What’s important, as a student, is discerning the uniqueness of your thoughts, not from your peers, but from what you see outside the classroom walls. What is important, as a practitioner, is applying that insight towards transforming what “is” into what you think it should be.
Read Steven’s Enhancing Organizational Capacity to Infuse Teaching and Learning with 21st Century Solutions, this thought provoking paper on implementing technology to improve classroom outcomes. See link: Steven-Hicks.pdf (175 downloads)