A Passion for Policy

Living in Florence is a time I often wish I could re-live. The EUPS program pushes students to engage with a variety of cultures and truly provides an immersive experience into the political process.

For me, the program shaped the way that I view challenges and approach solutions as well as my ability to be successful in my career. The combination of hands-on experience and a traditional academic setting provided a well-rounded perspective of policy development and political systems. But the simulations, group work, and a final internship, especially while being forced to consider a problem from all sides, really helped me hone a wide range of skills. Applying this skill as a student focused on policy, I worked to incorporate and anticipate oppositional viewpoints in my strategy papers in order to develop more comprehensive solutions. Similarly, the collaboration and debate fostered during group work lead to better results, proving the point that no long-lasting policy is created in isolation. These experiences are what confirmed in me a desire to apply critical thought in an active setting, using research to address problems in real-time.

After graduation, I returned to Oregon and became a Chief of Staff in the Oregon State Legislature. In this position, I wrote education policy and worked to move it through the legislative process, applying many of the research, critical analysis, and collaborative skills I learned while earning my Masters. Being able to take a problem, listen to stakeholders, research potential solutions, and then get to work writing state law that could solve it was a rewarding experience.

One policy with which I was deeply involved stands out as the most impactful: improving credit transfer from Oregon community colleges to the state’s public universities. Across Oregon, students transferring from a community college to a public university often found that they would have to repeat lower-level coursework in order to meet certain requirements and transfer credits weren’t counted towards a degree leading to increased student debt for a large number of Oregon students. When legislative leadership resolved to address this more than 30-year-old issue, I was fortunate enough to lead the stakeholder group and draft the legislation. Ultimately, the final format of the bill included (1) the creation of a foundational curriculum, a minimum of 30 credits that when completed at any Oregon community college are guaranteed to transfer to a public university and count towards the four year degree; and (2) a process and a timeline to complete transfer maps for majors that allow students to take coursework at a community college, transfer to a university on the same degree path, and apply all of their credits towards degree requirements. This bill was signed into law in the summer of 2017 and already the coursework for foundational curriculum has been solidified and stakeholders are on track to formulate transfer agreements for five majors.

Collaborating, working through disagreement to build compromise, and finally passing a law that will have a wide-ranging impact across Oregon’s education system was truly the culminating moment of taking what I had learned in academia and applying it in a real-world setting. Now, I’m seeking application to a Doctor of Education program, hoping to build on my previous academic and professional experience to continue developing sound education policy. I could provide numerous other examples of how and when I applied the skills learned through the EUPS program. But I’ll sum it up by saying that I would have been much more limited in my success without it.