ExecEd and Students, Together at Last
by Jason Elliott on February 26, 2008 in HKS News
The end of February at the Kennedy School is the traditional time when first-year students worry over summer internships and graduating second-years stress endlessly over career plans.
A vast, untapped resource exists at the school, however, that could allay at least some of these anxieties - Executive Education fellows. In recent months the Office of Professional Development (OPD) and the Executive Education program have combined their efforts to link degree students with executive fellows in an attempt to pair job seeking students with job offering fellows. So far only a smattering of programs have taken place, but the joint plan is to ratchet up cooperation between the heretofore disparate program offices.
“We have been trying very hard to bring these two worlds together more effectively,” said Executive Education Assistant Dean Robyn Champion.
Traditionally degree students have viewed the Executive Education program as an opaque, separate sphere at HKS. It is more common to hear a cheap shot about ExecEd’s free coffee and pastries than a substantive remark about the people who enroll in those programs.
“I’m sure that the Exec Ed fellows could be a great resource to us and vice-versa,” said Emilian Papadopoulos (MPP2). “But as it stands, most students don’t really know who they are or how we can gain access to them.”
Mystery abounds regarding the name-tagged strangers that roam the hallways outside Weiner Auditorium and L-150. The fellows are actually a diverse group of professionals who come to the Kennedy School for anywhere from two days to five weeks to study management, ethics and a host of other practical subjects.
These groups of professional bureaucrats, politicians, and activists have much to offer students in the way of employment opportunities. Until recently, though, no formal systems existed to connect job-hungry students with opportunity-offering executive fellows.
Now, the Office of Professional Development (OPD) is teaming up with the Executive Education program to offer connections for students seeking summer internships, PAE clients or full-time employment opportunities. The theory behind the collaboration is simple: put ExecEd fellows and students in a room together over some drinks and snacks, and the rest will sort itself out.
To this end, OPD has already partnered with ExecEd to join participants from various programs with students. One of the most successful such pairings included ExecEd participants from the Young Global Leaders program, which brings innovators under 40 years old from around the world to Harvard for multi-day, interdisciplinary sessions. The ExecEd program offered OPD an opportunity to pair 20 students with a variety of Young Global Leader participants, including celebrated Oakland labor activist Van Jones, a member of Parliament from New Zealand, various private sector executives, as well as journalists and bureaucrats from around the world.
One particular ExecEd program, the State and Local Government program, has potential for much student employment, but this is still a “growing partnership,” according to OPD Associate Director Judith Coquillette. In the future, OPD and ExecEd both hope to formalize the mechanisms through which local and state officials can meet with students interested in a host of issues from infrastructure development to affordable housing.
Getting students and fellows together can prove challenging, however, with many ExecEd sessions scheduled from 8:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. daily. Despite the time constraints, OPD says that the fellows enjoy interacting with students, and the ExecEd administration has been eager to cooperate. Whether this is true will bear itself out when Executive fellows are forced to decide between an evening mixer with a V.I.P. or a cocktail hour with students. OPD’s official stance, however, is wholly optimistic.
“Executive Education has been enormously cooperative in carving out time for students,” Coquillette said.
Executive Education’s leadership views the chance to connect students and fellows as a value-added proposition for both parties. Obviously, the students want jobs and internships, but the fellows get a chance to meet the next generation of global leaders.
The flagship of ExecEd is the Senior Executive Fellow program, a month-long, $16,000 session for high-ranking officials in the U.S. Federal government. While these fellows are restricted from hiring non-U.S. citizens, there have nonetheless been a handful of very productive interactions with degree students. One representative requested an intern to work on national security issues, and several job postings have resulted from alerting fellows to the benefits of a Kennedy School diploma.
International government fellows offer a promising, yet undeveloped source of jobs. These fellows are often faced with the same requirement as U.S. officials: namely, they can only hire citizens of their respective countries. This gives OPD an opportunity to match select groups of international students with ExecEd fellows from their home countries.
Recently, a group of Turkish government officials came to HKS for an ExecEd program, but scheduling conflicts prevented OPD from setting up a meeting with Turkish students. But there is always a next time.
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