Meet our alumni: Michael Hassett

I grew up in rural Western Pennsylvania. Before graduate school, I served with AmeriCorps in Pittsburgh and then joined the Peace Corps, where I served in a rural village in Tonga. Those experiences gave me a strong interest in public service and in how policy and institutions can either help communities solve problems or make those problems harder to address.

When I came back from the Peace Corps, I knew graduate school was the next step. I wanted to develop the policy, analytical, and research skills that would allow me to take what I had learned in the field and apply it more broadly.

I applied to a number of graduate programs and was fortunate to be accepted to several, but none of them really felt like the right fit. UMBC was different. The Shriver Peaceworker Program immediately caught my attention, but what really stood out was how much the Public Policy department seemed to care about its students.

I remember Dr. Lauren Hamilton Edwards actually calling me while I was trying to decide where to go. She wasn’t calling to sell me on UMBC. She just wanted to introduce herself and say hello. That call changed everything for me. It made UMBC feel less like a school that had admitted me and more like a community that actually wanted me to be there.

The Shriver Peaceworker Program was another major reason I chose UMBC. To have a community of Returned Peace Corps Volunteers applying their international experience to domestic challenges in Baltimore was an incredible opportunity. We had all come back from very different places, but we were trying to figure out how to take what we had learned overseas and apply it to problems much closer to home.

Ultimately, UMBC gave me what I was looking for: rigorous public policy training, close mentorship, and a community of people committed to public service. I initially came in for the M.P.P., but the strength of that foundation and mentorship convinced me to stay and pursue my Ph.D.

And those relationships didn’t disappear when I graduated. Ten years later, many of those same people are still friends, mentors, and people I turn to for advice and perspective. I don’t think I understood how valuable that would be when I was making my decision about where to go to graduate school.

Dr. Lauren Hamilton Edwards was my advisor and mentor throughout both my master’s and doctoral work, and she had a tremendous influence on my time at UMBC. In fact, her guidance and approach to public policy were central to my decision to continue past the M.P.P. and complete the Ph.D.

Lauren made graduate school approachable. She showed me that academia didn’t have to be cutthroat or competitive. It could be a community of people who were intellectually curious, challenged one another, and cared about applying theory to real-world problems. That changed how I thought about what academia could be.

The Shriver Peaceworker Program also gave me opportunities to put that philosophy into practice. My first year, I worked at Commodore John Rogers Elementary and Middle School as a college access coordinator. My second year, I worked with St. Vincent de Paul of Baltimore on policy issues surrounding people experiencing homelessness. Those experiences put me much closer to the people and organizations affected by the policies we were studying.

The people in the program were just as important as the coursework. My classmates brought a tremendous amount of real-world experience into the classroom. I was surrounded by people working in the federal government, public officials, nonprofit professionals, and others already deeply involved in public service. They weren’t just talking about policy from a textbook. They were bringing their own experiences into the conversation, and that made the classroom much richer.

I still use what I learned at UMBC. My strategic planning coursework has been particularly useful in my work at NOAA Fisheries, and I continue to draw on the research methods and other concepts from the program, including in work related to employee engagement.

What I remember most is that the classroom, the Peaceworker placements, my faculty mentors, and my classmates were all connected. I wasn’t just learning about public policy. I was learning how to take research and theory and use them to understand problems that real people and institutions were trying to solve.

Give yourself some grace.

I had incredible imposter syndrome during my first semester at UMBC. I actually considered dropping out.

I had just spent two years in Tonga, speaking Tongan and teaching rudimentary English to Tongan students. Then I came back to the United States and found myself in Baltimore, surrounded by incredibly brilliant people and engaging with issues that felt enormous. It was also just a few months after the death of Freddie Gray and the unrest in Baltimore.

Everywhere I looked, we were confronting questions about racial injustice and inequality. And these weren’t abstract questions. Baltimore was dealing with inequalities that were deeply connected to policies and practices from decades earlier, including redlining and blockbusting. I felt completely ill-equipped to even talk about some of these issues, let alone understand how I could help.

For a while, I wondered whether I belonged in graduate school at all.

Dr. Joby Taylor and the Shriver Peaceworker Program were instrumental in helping me work through that. They helped me connect what I was learning in class to the problems I was seeing around me and, importantly, to think about solutions. I began to realize that I didn’t need to walk into graduate school with all the answers. I needed to be willing to ask better questions, listen, and learn.

Part of finding my voice in those challenging classroom discussions also meant confronting a deep fear of public speaking. My classmates were incredibly supportive as I struggled through some of my early presentations. Eventually, I decided to bite the bullet and take an improv class through the Baltimore Improv Group. It was uncomfortable, but it forced me to get comfortable with uncertainty and helped me overcome that fear. It ended up being one of the most useful things I did.

So my advice to current students is to lean into the community around you. Don’t be afraid to say you don’t know something. Don’t assume everyone else has everything figured out. They probably don’t. Take opportunities that push you outside your comfort zone, even if they seem a little ridiculous at the time.

And build relationships. Your classmates and professors may end up being some of the most important people in your professional life. Ten years later, I’m still talking to people I met at UMBC and still reaching out to mentors I had there. Those relationships have been every bit as valuable as the degree itself.

For people entering the job market, I’d also say don’t feel like you need to have your entire career mapped out when you graduate. Mine certainly wasn’t. Develop skills that travel with you, stay curious, and take opportunities that put you closer to the problems you care about. Your first job doesn’t have to be your forever job.

One of the biggest things I took from UMBC was the habit of asking a very simple question: What does success actually look like?

That question has followed me throughout my career, and it has had a particularly direct impact on the work I’ve done over the last nine years co-founding and leading Friends of Tonga.

Friends of Tonga is very much a product of the ethos I experienced at UMBC and through the Shriver Peaceworker Program. We are gritty and scrappy. We’re a volunteer-run organization without a large staff or a lot of resources, so we have to be thoughtful about how we use what we have. And we have to be honest with ourselves about whether what we’re doing is actually working.

That means asking questions that sound simple but aren’t always easy to answer. What does success look like? How do we know if we’re making a tangible difference? What data should we collect? How do we measure impact in the real world? And once we have that information, how do we communicate it in a way that is compelling enough that someone wants to support the work?

The stories matter. They help people understand the human side of what we’re doing. But a good story isn’t the same thing as evidence that a program is working. We need both.

That way of thinking goes back to my experiences at UMBC. The program taught me to question assumptions, think critically about programs and policies, collect meaningful information, and use evidence to make better decisions. At Friends of Tonga, I now have to put those lessons into practice every day.

I think that is one of the real strengths of the program. You aren’t just learning theories or preparing for a particular job. You’re learning how to think, how to work with people who see a problem differently, how to evaluate whether something is actually working, and how to turn ideas into action.

When I first walked into UMBC, I certainly couldn’t have predicted where the next ten years would take me. I couldn’t have mapped out a career that included federal service, a Ph.D., and eventually co-founding and leading a nonprofit working in Tonga.

But looking back, the thread is pretty clear. I learned to listen, ask better questions, understand the problem, develop practical solutions, and then ask whether those solutions actually worked.

I probably didn’t appreciate all of that while I was a student. I appreciate it a lot more now.