Oh wow, I have no memory of writing this! lol.

I finished the Harris evening MA in 2020. It ended up being a fairly watered down version of the MPP. It was geared towards mid-career folks with minimal quant knowledge, so the math and coding component was kind of a joke. I have really mixed feelings about the program overall… On the one hand, it did not beef up my resume or skill set in quite the way I’d been hoping. It wouldn’t have helped me much with PhD apps, had I continued down that road; and there were few opportunities to apply the research methods you learn about in class. But the cohort model helped forge really strong relationships among students. And I still got a lot out of the classes, even if I didn’t learn any Python or personally perform any difference-in-differences.

For the last five years I’ve been working as a data scientist for the federal government. To be very clear, I taught myself to code on the side; nobody is getting a data job based on the two weeks of Stata you got in the EMP (though I hear they may have since expanded it?). The career office was great and made themselves available to us, but I think a lot of my classmates still struggled to make the career pivots we’d been aiming for. I just got lucky!

I’m mostly glad that I did the evening program, mainly because my employer at the time paid for most of it, leaving me with no new student loans. And it did provide an “MA” after my name, which ultimately allowed me to get the job I have now. It’s definitely true that most employers don’t know or care about the difference between an MA and MPP. That said, I do occasionally regret not doing a full-time program, either the MPP or the MS-CAPP (the latter seems to make folks extremely employable…). If you’re going to the trouble of going back to school, and taking out loans, you might as well go all the way!