MPA Degree Helps Grad Advance Her Career and Her Organization

Emily Olson is the Director of Operations for a relatively new DC-based nonprofit – the Schools, Health & Libraries (SHLB) Coalition – Olson uses the knowledge she earned in grad school to get her organization’s wheels turning.

“SHLB only got nonprofit status last year, so I had an opportunity to create government documents, accounting systems, everything an organization needs to run,” she said.

For Olson, it’s a chance to apply all of her field experience and the knowledge from her Master of Public Administration (MPA) degree to her day-to-day.

“The professors at the Schar School were great,” she said. “I have used some of my classwork in public administration – such as Ethics and Organization Theory – to set procedures and guidelines for my organization. I get to apply my grad school textbooks to my job – very rare!”

But Emily’s career began with a penchant for volunteer work.

“My mother was very adamant that we had to volunteer,” she said. “I started in middle school, and by high school I was volunteering at the local Red Cross.”

Olson grew up in North Carolina but took her altruism with her to college in Chicago, where she continued volunteering for a larger Red Cross chapter. It was there that she met an influential coworker who steered her and her zeal for volunteerism toward the idea of the Peace Corps. She was instantly sold.

“I became really passionate about Peace Corps from my first year of college,” she said.

Research led Olson to the Master’s International (MI) program – a unique degree track that couples Peace Corps service with graduate-level coursework, removing the agony of having to choose between doing one or the other after obtaining a bachelor’s.

“I loved the idea of saving money and time,” said Olson, who, after much research and careful selection, chose to pursue a Master of Public Administration (MPA) via the MI program at George Mason’s Schar School of Policy and Government.

One year later – after an initial round of stateside graduate work – Olson was serving as a Peace Corps volunteer at a youth center in a remote Berber mountain village in Morocco. It was a dream assignment that would test all of her volunteering chops.
Prompted by a new handbook, the V2 Volunteerism Action Guide, she encouraged kids to adopt the volunteer spirit and contribute to their community – everything from simple trash cleanup to the importance of daily oral hygiene. It was an exercise with revelatory results.

“Some projects were successful, some weren’t – you don’t really realize why, so I applied a lot of case studies, figured out what worked and what didn’t,” she said.

Olson thus developed a soft spot for analyzing Peace Corps structure. She excelled in determining how communication breakdowns happen and why some volunteers fall short.

“I did it in reverse: Most people study a framework then take it out into the real world; I went out into the real world then went back to school to figure out my own method of project management.”