Jillian Harvey chose the Watson Institute's Master of Public Affairs program when she was looking to redirect her career. "Before I applied to the program, my career wasn't exactly what I had planned," she said. “As an undergraduate, I planned to be an archeologist. But my field school got canceled because of low enrollment during my senior year, and I took that as a sign that it wasn't the right path for me.”
After graduating from the University of Massachusetts Amherst with a bachelor's degree in anthropology in 2013, Harvey took positions as a teen youth leader at the Brookline Teen Center and as a patient experience representative at Boston Children's Hospital's Autism Spectrum Center.
After working with at-risk populations for five years, Harvey was ready to make a more substantial impact and saw Watson's MPA program as the vehicle to accomplish that. "I started to see the inequities in our healthcare system and our educational system," she said. “Brookline is an affluent town, but I was working with students who were getting left behind. At the hospital, I worked with families who could not get the specialized care they needed because their insurance company told them they had to use a different hospital. Other families would spend nearly a year waiting for prior authorization for testing.”
While at Boston Children's, Harvey attended informational sessions sponsored by the hospital's government relations program. "That's what got the wheels turning for me," she said. “I realized that if I wanted to make a real difference, I needed to better understand policy-making.”
"When I decided I wanted to study public policy, I was accepted into a number of programs, but Brown's was the most attractive option for me," she said. Watson's one-year program was particularly appealing to Harvey as a mid-career professional. "I was in my late twenties and was working two jobs, and I knew if I didn't focus and dedicate one full year to my studies, it would take me a lot longer," she said.
Watson's curriculum and the balance between coursework and hands-on experience also impressed Harvey. "The way Watson's MPA program was structured made a lot of sense to me," she said. "Statistics and economics are vital to any policy work, and having to re-take those classes at a higher level was important to me." Harvey was also drawn to the fact that she could apply what she was learning to real-world situations within the program. "The consultancy component [now called the Policy in Action Project] was really important to me," she said. "I liked being able to apply the skills I was learning to a real-world issue within the context of the program."
With her career on hold, Harvey was determined to make as much of her one year at Brown as possible. "I wanted to dig into the community and learn more about the university," she said. It was a strategy that led her into a new arena that would have a profound impact on her career after she left Brown. "I got involved with the DEI [diversity, equity and inclusion] advisory board for the dean of students," she said. "That was the first time I engaged with graduate students of color outside my program. I'm grateful for the connections I made. I became friends with some of those individuals and have remained in touch with them to this day," said Harvey.
Within a year of earning her MPA in 2019, Harvey accepted a position as director of diversity, equity and inclusion for the town of Arlington, MA, but her career quickly took an unexpected turn. "My position was housed within the town's health and human services department," she said, "and at the beginning of 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic struck, it was 'all hands on deck.'"
