Greetings from the School of Public Policy (SPP) Graduate Admissions Office! As we begin the New Year, we are very excited to launch our School's first Admissions blog. We hope this will be a site that you visit regularly for updated information on a variety of topics, ranging from the experiences of our current students, to faculty insights on our School, to recommendations from the Admissions Office. We look forward to this being an information exchange and opportunity for you to communicate your thoughts and questions directly to us.

With this inaugural blog, I'd like to take the opportunity to introduce you to one of the most important elements of SPP: our students. We are extremely proud of the student body here in the School of Public Policy and I thought you might like to hear about the types of students who enroll in our programs. With almost 1,000 students enrolled (between our Ph.D. program, five Master's degrees, Certificates and non-degree option), our students come to us with a very wide variety of academic, geographic, and professional backgrounds.

As of the Fall 2007, our student body represents 57 different nations, with citizens of such countries as Armenia, Cameroon, Indonesia, Venezuela, Cyprus, Eritrea, Malta, Tunisia and Yemen, to name a few. In terms of professional backgrounds, students also show tremendous diversity in what they have done prior to entering and while enrolled at SPP. Currently in our student body we have a former professional dancer; returning Peace Corps Volunteers from Mali, Bulgaria and Niger; civil servants from the Government of India; an ordained minister; a medical doctor; and a former White House correspondent for Bloomberg News. Certainly, students bring with them an interesting mix of work experience both in the field of policy and outside of it. Finally, students' academic backgrounds also run the gamut, with prior studies focusing in everything from criminal justice to environmental science to civil engineering to business administration to Russian literature. As you can imagine, the diversity of our student body makes for a very dynamic classroom filled with a range of perspectives and experiences.

We hope that you will become a part of this vibrant, diverse student body. We look forward to the contributions that you will make to enhance the School of Public Policy.

Leslie Metzger Levin

Assistant Dean of Graduate Admissions and Marketing

Labels: Admissions, Diversity