When she arrived in the United States in 2001, Monika Gorzelanska had already managed a nonprofit in her native Poland, earned a bachelor of arts degree from the University of Lodz, and carried with her both ambition and a clear sense that she was not done learning.
But after September 11, the world changed, her path shifted, and she found herself searching for the next step knowing that would include more education.
“I worked for nonprofits, but I saw myself doing more,” she said. Going back to school full time didn’t appeal to her—she was in her late 20s and wanted to continue working. She needed a program that fit her life, not the other way around. She found it at George Mason University.
“George Mason was the perfect fit,” she said. “Without a doubt.”
From 2004 to 2006 she studied in the Peace Operations master’s degree program at George Mason’s Schar School of Policy and Government, an interdisciplinary program that unified practitioners and researchers in a way she hadn’t experienced before. (The program is now a concentration in the Schar School’s top-ranked Master of International Security program.)
“I absolutely loved that program,” she said. “It had the perfect mix of practitioners but also it was rooted in research and books and literature. It was just incredible. These two years were the best years that I’ve ever spent at school.”
What Gorzelanska learned in the program proved immediately useful. In 2008, she joined the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), beginning an 18-year career in the Foreign Service that spanned seven countries, countless crises, and a lifetime’s worth of perspective.
She started as a program officer, the person who asks the hard questions during budget planning, strategy design, and on-the-ground problem solving. Her Schar School degree proved its value immediately.
“It really helped me be much better and ask better questions,” she said. “Conflict is not just open war; it’s the tensions that we can’t see.”
Those insights shaped her work everywhere she went: post-Orange Revolution Ukraine; Ghana during the early years of off-shore oil discovery; post-war Georgia; Central Asia during the rise of Russia and China; Kenya and Somalia during critical democratic and humanitarian shifts. It was an exotic and exhilarating career.
In Somalia she helped support newly liberated communities that often returned to find their infrastructure—water wells, cell towers—destroyed by the Sunni Islamist militant movement Al-Shabaab. USAID rebuilt them, but always with a message: “’This is from the government of Somalia,’” she said. “So they could feel the government was behind them.”
Somalia, she said, was probably the most rewarding post, but every assignment had meaning. “Every station had an angle that was just so different,” she said.
In fact, she and her family were in Somalia when the Trump administration ended her USAID career. After seven different false starts for departure, they finally returned to Arlington, Virginia, not far from Mason Square and the Schar School.
That was in late May. It wasn’t long before her instinct to serve kicked in.
“Once a public servant, always a public servant,” she said, shrugging her shoulders.
She emailed the alumni office and soon joined the Schar School Alumni Chapter engagement committee where she helps develop strategies to communicate with the Schar School’s alumni base of about 17,000 graduates.
While she searches for her next professional career step, she keeps her spirit up with the philosophical outlook that “the universe never gives you want you want,” she said.
Meanwhile, she has written a self-published book about her time at USAID. It’s called Beneath the Flag: From the Field to Framework—A Former Foreign Service Officer’s Guide to Project and Team Management That Transformed Lives.
The title is as evocative as the contents.
“No matter where in the world you are, the U.S. embassies always have a big pole and this giant American flag,” she said. “Everyday I went through the door, and I saw the flag. It actually meant something. It meant accountability. It meant democracy, governance, trust.”