I have wanted to work in public policy since my second year of university, when a professor in my quantitative methods course asked our class why the city we studied in had rebuilt the same intersection three times in eight years. Nobody could answer. The intersection was in the news that month because a cyclist had been killed there, and the answer, when I finally found it, was that three different departments each held a piece of the decision and none of them held the whole of it. That was the first time I understood that a bad outcome is often nobody's mistake and everybody's process1.
Since graduating I have spent four years at the state Department of Transportation, first as a data analyst and then as the person who runs our project prioritization model. The model takes about nine hundred candidate projects a year and ranks them on safety, congestion, state of repair and equity. My part of it is the safety score. When I inherited it, the safety score used five years of crash data and nothing else, which meant a corridor with a near-miss problem and no fatalities yet scored as though it were safe2. I spent most of a year building a version that uses roadway design features as a leading indicator, validated it against the following year's crashes, and got it adopted into the scoring cycle. Twenty-two projects moved up more than fifty places. Four of them were built last summer.3
I also learned what the model cannot do. It cannot tell you why a project that scores well sits for six years, and in our state the answer is usually that the local match is a share of construction cost, so the poorest counties can least afford the projects their residents most need. I wrote that up in a memo. The memo went to my director, and my director agreed with it, and nothing happened4, because changing a match formula is a legislative act and I do not know how to do legislative acts. That is the gap I want the degree to close. I can build the evidence. I cannot yet move it.5
The MPP is the right degree for that. I want more econometrics than I have, particularly causal inference, because the honest answer to "did the projects we prioritized reduce crashes" is that I do not know, and I want to be able to know. I want a real grounding in the politics of budgeting, which I have only ever seen from underneath. And I want two years around people who work on housing and health and schools rather than only roads6, because the counties I am describing are not failing at transportation, they are failing at the same thing in six departments at once.
Your program is one of the top ranked programs in the country and its graduates go on to serve at every level of government.7 The faculty are leaders in their fields and the curriculum is rigorous and quantitative.8 I have read about the strong alumni network and I know that graduates of your program are exceptionally well placed9 for the kind of career I am describing. The location, in a major policy center, would also give me access to opportunities that would not be available elsewhere.10
After the degree I want to go back to a state department of transportation, or to a state budget office, in a role where the analysis and the decision sit closer together than they do in my current job. Longer term I would like to run the capital program for a state, because that is the seat where the formula and the projects and the politics are all in one room.11 I know that is a long way from where I am. I also know that the person who has that job today started, twenty years ago, roughly where I am standing.
I am ready to be a beginner again for two years in order to be more useful for the twenty after that.12