This summer, the Watson School of International and Public Affairs welcomed a cohort of 43 Master of Public Affairs (MPA) students, including five students enrolled in the dual MPA/MPH (Master of Public Health) degree program.
Bryce Millett Steinberg, the faculty director of the MPA Program, emphasized the cooperative and collegial spirit of the new cohort. “I taught this cohort over the summer, so I’ve already seen how hard they work and how much they support each other,” she said. “Students with strong quantitative backgrounds helped their groups through the math, and others brought years of on-the-ground experience to every discussion. In my first year as director, I want to build on that culture. The analytical skills matter, but so do the relationships they’re forming with each other.”
This year’s cohort brings a wide and varied range of professional experiences, policy interests and backgrounds, with a shared commitment to public affairs. According to application data, Associate Director of Admissions and Recruitment, Catherine Rodarte, shared that 79% of this year’s class are U.S. students representing 16 states, including the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. International students make up the remaining 21% of the class, hailing from 10 different countries. Rodarte additionally noted that this year’s class includes students with full-time professional experience, with 51% of the cohort reporting prior work experience.
One student with previous work experience, Kawika Pegram, most recently worked as a civil rights specialist for the Hawaii Department of Transportation, working on small business development, homelessness, human trafficking and racial discrimination. Pegram was born in Hawaii and currently resides there, but he also spent some of his formative years in Las Vegas and the Philippines.
After eight years in the Philippines, Pegram returned to Hawaii, feeling a bit like an outsider, to attend Waipahu High School, where he became very active as a community organizer promoting climate justice. “I was that kid who would always go to the principal and ask, ‘Can I organize a protest?’ or ‘Can I get people to sign my petition?’” he said. His interest in public affairs led him to American University, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in an interdisciplinary major called “Communications, Legal Institutions, Economics and Government.”
But even with his education and work experience, Pegram knew there were gaps in his analytical skill set that he needed to address to advance his career and effect change, which is what brought him to the MPA program.
Pegram was especially drawn to Brown’s MPA program because of its intensive, analytically focused summer sequence. The summer sequence is comprised of four accelerated classes that all cohort members take together: Economics for Public Policy; Statistics for Public Policy; Economics of Government Intervention; and Statistics for Program Intervention.
While Pegram noted that his limited analytical background made the summer sequence challenging, he also found it highly rewarding. “The beauty of a program like this is that it forces you to sit down and focus without any distractions,” he said. “I could purely focus on getting these skills down and learning how to apply them correctly.”
When Preston Parrish, another mid-career professional, lost his job at USAID in 2025, he decided it was a good time to do some long-planned career development. “I had always planned to leave USAID at some point,” he said, “and if there is a silver lining to this, it’s that losing my job spurred me to think more deeply about exactly what I would like to do in my career.”
He said he viewed Brown’s MPA program as an opportunity to make a “micro-pivot” and gain deeper knowledge of areas critical to international development work. Before working for USAID, Parrish studied international relations at the University of Cincinnati. After graduating, he worked as a contract specialist at USAID, which gave him firsthand insight into how development funding moves through government systems and how bureaucracies can either aid or hinder development efforts.
His interest in how internal and external forces shape a bureaucracy’s structure and effectiveness drew him to Brown’s MPA program. “There are a couple of faculty members here that I really wanted to learn from,” said Parrish. He noted that Tyler Jost’s research on how bureaucracies shape foreign policy and Nitsan Chorev’s work on the role of international bureaucracies in transforming international health policy made Brown a particularly attractive destination for him.
