Master’s in Public Administration

Kiera Hall: Meet the MPA Student Who Founded a PAC to Help Marginalized Candidates

Andrew J Schappert — Thu, 20 Oct 2022 13:15:28 +0000

Kiera Hall: Meet the MPA Student Who Founded a PAC to Help Marginalized Candidates Andrew J Schappert Thu, 10/20/2022 - 09:15

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Kiera Hall: ‘Local elections can be more expensive than senate elections. It is a very broken system.’

Kiera Hall is not the typical political operative. But based on her recent success and her determination to continue it, the Schar School Master’s in Public Administration student clearly means business.

Hall, 29, is the founding executive director of Commonwealth Forward, a nimble and narrowly focused political action committee (PAC) devoted to fighting “the corrosive effects of corporate influence on our domestic process,” according to its mission statement, and supporting progressive campaigns throughout Virginia. Those would-be civic leaders include many who are marginalized by the traditional institutions that recruit and support candidates.

In the last year, Hall has raised more than $1.6 million for the cause.

While busy trying to raise donations and helping candidates all over Virginia win elections, she is also pursuing her master’s degree in public administration, which teaches the skills and insights the executive director of a PAC will need.

“Yes, I said to myself, this degree is just right for me. Folks in public administration want the world to be a better place, and that is the place for me,” she said.

Hall has been putting her focus not on the “big guys” of politics, she said, but on young candidates who want to run on the local level, who stand up to corruption and fight for racial, environmental, and economic justice.

”Money is a barrier to entry in politics,” she said. “Local elections can be more expensive than senate elections. It is a very broken system. It can cost more than $1 million to run for local elections.”

Fundraising is not an easy job, but Hall is committed to become a big player in the world of “smaller” local candidates whose offices are no less important than the high-profile seats of power. She also knows very well her weak points and knows how to mend them: With knowledge, which is what brought her to the Schar School.

The Schar School’s highly ranked MPA program, she said, is teaching her “how to manage people, how to be a better leader, how to do accounting for an NGO [nongovernment organization], how to run a board of directors.”

In one of her classes, she literally took the budget proposal of the professor and applied it to her organization. It worked like a charm, she reported.

Hall seems to have found her niche and her appetite for knowledge satiated at Schar School. “The best professors are there and within reach,” she said, and when she needs to learn more, “I will come back.”

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Master’s in Public Administration

Politics

Schar School News October 2022

Schar School Student Spotlight

Alumni Spotlight: D.C. Police Spokesman Dustin Sternbeck

Andrew J Schappert — Tue, 21 Jun 2022 19:15:34 +0000

Alumni Spotlight: D.C. Police Spokesman Dustin Sternbeck Andrew J Schappert Tue, 06/21/2022 - 15:15

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Metropolitan Police Department Spokesman Dustin Sternbeck: ‘It was great to just have the opportunity to work alongside and learn from industry experts and from the professors, but also from my classmates.’

If the name Dustin Sternbeck, rings a bell, maybe it’s a siren.

Sternbeck serves as director of communications for the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) of the District of Columbia, and as such he is often the voice you hear on the radio or the face you see on TV when high-profile police activity in Washington makes the news.

The MPD is the nation’s sixth-largest police department, with some 4,500 sworn and civilian employees. You can imagine he stays busy.

“That’s the understatement of the year,” said Sternbeck, a 2010 Schar School of Policy and Government graduate who joined the MPD six years ago after holding a similar position in Arlington County. “They warned me when I was interviewing that it's hard to imagine the pace and volume, but man, were they right.”

His job additionally entails serving as communications co-chair for high security events—the Presidential Inauguration, for instance. The position has Sternbeck putting out fire after figurative fire just about each day in a city that has seen a noticeable uptick in crime in the last several years.

It wasn’t that long ago the 41-year-old Sternbeck was putting out fires of a different sort, as a fireman and a public information officer in the Loudoun County Department of Fire, Rescue, and Emergency Management. He worked there when he started pursuing his Master’s in Public Administration degree in the Schar School’s Northern Virginia Public Service Fellows Program in 2010.

Participants in the highly ranked Northern Virginia Public Service Fellows Program—in which the students study and work together toward creating policy to solve a real-life problem—are nominated by their employers and their tuition is paid in full or in part by the agency.

“It was great to just have the opportunity to work alongside and learn from industry experts and from the professors, but also from my classmates,” Sternbeck said of the program. During the course he and the others were exposed to “every facet of local government, so you develop an appreciation for jobs that aren't necessarily within my day-to-day responsibilities.”

The MPA degree prepared the Northern Virginia native with a familiarity and understanding of government hierarchy, budgeting, and “all the different pieces of the puzzle and how they really fit together so that we all ultimately can do what we got into the business for—to serve our communities.”

Sternbeck said he applies some aspect of what he learned in the MPA program each day.

“I owe a lot to that program and I always encourage people to explore options if they're interested in public administration to check that one,” he said. “It’s hard to imagine that there are other better programs in the country.”

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Master’s in Public Administration

Schar School News June 2022

Double Alum Finds Fulfillment with Master’s in Public Administration

Andrew J Schappert — Wed, 25 May 2022 14:08:14 +0000

Double Alum Finds Fulfillment with Master’s in Public Administration Andrew J Schappert Wed, 05/25/2022 - 10:08

In This Story

Katrin B. Anacker

Meron Aboye: ‘When you’re studying something you are passionate about, it’s not about the grades anymore, it’s about what you’re actually learning.’

After earning her BS in chemistry from ��AV in 2019, Meron Aboye had a plan to attend pharmacy school. She has always followed a checklist. Go to college. Check. Take the right classes. Check. Get your bachelor’s degree. Check. Apply to pharmacy school. Check. But as she began receiving acceptances from several schools, she started to panic.

“I had a lot of reservations that this career wasn’t really for me,” she said. “I had never had those feelings before.”

So, even though she admits to being nervous, Aboye completely altered her plans.

“I decided to scrap that idea and find something I really wanted to pursue,” she said.

In a sharp pivot, she enrolled in the Master’s in Public Administration program in Mason’s Schar School of Policy and Government, where she was initially intrigued by the nonprofit management concentration.

“Nonprofits have had a lot of impact on my life and I’ve always wanted to do nonprofit work,” she said. (She was part of Mason’s Early Identification Program, which provides access to educational resources for middle and high school students who will be the first in their families to attend college.)

Once she learned that an MPA could lead to other career avenues beyond nonprofits, including working in local or federal government, Aboye felt excited by the possibilities.

“With undergrad I had a list of everything I wanted to do and that kind of cornered me in one area,” she said. “That’s why I decided to go with the MPA. If I wanted to concentrate on nonprofits I could, but I could still be open to what else is out there for me.”

Aboye experienced a new-found motivation in her coursework.

“When you’re studying something you are passionate about, it’s not about the grades anymore, it’s about what you’re actually learning,” she said. “It felt fulfilling that the work I was going to do was going to be impactful.”

Aboye credits her professors with providing support and counsel whenever she needed it.

“They were always very accessible,” she said. “I always felt like I had that community.”

Katrin Anacker, a professor in the Schar School, taught Aboye in her Policy and Program Evaluation course. She says it was a privilege to have Aboye in class.

“She is a critical, respectful thinker who broadens analyses and enriches discussions,” Anacker said. “Her excellent questions demonstrated that she had thought about the materials ahead of class. The entire class benefited from her contributions.”

Now that she has graduated—again—Aboye will begin a two-year fellowship with the Loudon County Department of Finance and Budget, where she will provide data analysis support.

“It’s exciting,” she said. “I have so much to learn. It will be a great opportunity for me to grow and develop, not just in my career but as a person.”

No matter where her career takes her, Aboye has learned that being openminded has its advantages.

“After switching from chemistry to where I am now and seeing how good that change can be, I’m not afraid of changing direction anymore,” she said.

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Master’s in Public Administration

Schar School News May 2022

Don’t Look Up? MPA Student Krystal Azelton Does Just That—to Keep Space Safe

Andrew J Schappert — Mon, 24 Jan 2022 19:42:00 +0000

Don’t Look Up? MPA Student Krystal Azelton Does Just That—to Keep Space Safe Andrew J Schappert Mon, 01/24/2022 - 14:42

Master’s in Public Administration student Krystal Azelton works to keep outer space sustainable.

You don’t think of outer space as a place that requires measures to maintain its sustainability. But it does, and Master’s in Public Administration student Krystal Azelton is busy at work trying to see that space “remains usable, peaceful, safe, and secure for the long term.”

Azelton serves as director of space applications programs for the Secure World Foundation, a Colorado-based nonprofit with offices in Washington, D.C., that acts, according to its website, as “a research body, convener, and facilitator to promote key space security and other space-related topics and to examine their influence on governance and international development.”

About a dozen employees at Secure World Foundation advocate for a domain with no inhabitants other than the increasing number of “space tourists” and the astronauts orbiting the Earth in the International Space Station (ISS).

Which is a case in point: In December, the ISS had to swerve to avoid a collision with debris from a U.S. rocket. This followed the postponement of a spacewalk that sent ISS astronauts scurrying for cover as hundreds of thousands of uncatalogued pieces of debris headed their way. That incident was blamed on a Russian rocket that intentionally destroyed a Russian satellite; NASA condemned the action.

See? Space needs an agency like Secure World Foundation, the only U.S. nonprofit focusing on space sustainability, Azelton said.

Azelton says her career path became more down to earth, so to speak, when at age 17 “I came to understand I was probably not going to be an astronaut.”

After earning an undergraduate degree at Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, she performed political development work in Sudan and Afghanistan, among other locales. While she enjoyed politics, space continued to appeal to her.

“I like science, but I didn’t want to be a scientist. I like learning about science and reading about it but I didn’t want to be in a lab,” she said.

Her interests brought her to NASA, where she was able to combine her government and project management skills while exploring space—specifically, the politics of it. That led to her current position at Secure World Foundation, where she represents global space issues to policy makers.

Just as she decided to earn a master’s degree in public administration, which is a degree that focuses on developing leadership and organizational skills, the pandemic locked out students from classrooms. The silver lining? She usually travels 30 to 60 percent of the time for her job, she said, and COVID-19 kept her at home to study.

When classrooms reopened, Azelton was all too happy to attend in person: “I want to know my fellow students and meet my teachers… I’ve been pleased with how [administrators] have been able to accommodate my schedule.”

Once she graduates, the master’s degree will help her reach her next level of professional success while also creating a drive to “learn more and explore more in depth” what she’s learning in the classroom.

Bottom line for her: “The Schar School is a good fit for me. And it’s an excellent value for the money, to be honest.”

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Master’s in Public Administration

Schar School News January 2022

Science

Space

Sustainability