 Good evening everyone. Good evening everyone. Good evening. Good evening. I'm Michael Barr. I'm the Joan and Sanford Wilde Dean of the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. It's my great honor to be here this evening. It's wonderful to see so many alumni and Ford School friends here tonight. This is my second time at this particular event and it's already become something that I look forward to. A great chance to connect with old friends here in Washington D.C. To our students in the crowd tonight. It's great to see you too. And so glad you made the trip and I hope you're having a really productive time in D.C. With the help of many alumni in the room, Jennifer Niggemyer, Elizabeth Johnson, Peter Vacher and their colleagues have put together two fantastic days of career events for nearly 40 Ford School master students on this annual D.C. trip. And I just want to say thanks to Jennifer and her team and my thanks to all of our panelists who are going to hear more about in just a moment. I'm also delighted to see here but not yet on stage Liz Gerber, the Associate Dean for Research and Policy Engagement. And I'm going to say more about Liz Gerber and her incredible impact on the Ford School in just a little bit. In addition to Jennifer's team, you'll see a number of other Ford School staff here tonight, including two new faces, Cindy Bank, a longtime member of Michigan's D.C. Office, has come to the Ford School to be the Associate Director for the Program and Practical Policy Engagement. She's right there in the back. The bright lights are shining right here on my eyeballs. Catherine Carver is somewhere here this evening, standing by the door, is our new events and outreach manager. And I can also say she is a great soccer coach of young children. And the team is really wonderful. I think most of the other members of the team you've had a chance to meet before. They're here, the staff are here to connect with alumni and find ways to recognize and celebrate your good work. And you'll recognize them by their little badges on their coats. In a few minutes, Liz is going to introduce our fantastic lineup of guest speakers and set the stage for our event on Engaged Learning. But first I want to give you some updates on what's happening back at the Ford School. I'd call this a state of the school kind of talk, but somehow without Speaker Pelosi behind me clapping, it wasn't quite right. Let me start with a wrap up of our recently concluded Victors for Michigan campaign. That's our fundraising campaign. Our goal for the Ford School was to raise $23 million. And I'm proud and thrilled to tell you that we far surpassed that goal. Together we've raised over $47 million for that campaign. Thank you. And I'll give a particular shout out at this point to Sue Johnson and Tony Wagner from the development team who really made this happen. And to all of you of course in the alumni and friend community of the Ford School who were able to donate such fantastic gifts to the school, it made a huge difference. I also want to thank my predecessor Susan Collins for her leadership and energy on this wonderful campaign. Let me mention a few gifts in particular, gifts that will support our students, research, faculty, and engagement for decades to come. Thanks to a phenomenal gift from Ron and Eileen Weiser, our newly launched Weiser Diplomacy Center will make the Ford School the premier place in the Midwest to study foreign affairs and one of the top centers nationally. Director John Cicciari and his colleagues will recruit new professors of practice and international diplomacy. The host policy simulations and establish a generous and strategic package of new student fellowships, internships, international trips, and more. It's a truly transformational opportunity for the Ford School. Thanks to the tremendous support from Phil and Kathy Power and the Power Foundation, our new program and practical policy engagement will make us a national leader in building constructive partnerships between policy leaders and academia and creating value for the people of Michigan and the nation. Liz Gerber is the founding faculty director of the center which we're calling P3E because the full name is a little bit much and her vision about the importance of engaged learning and policy research is essential to our future. Another gift I'd like to mention is one made by Hal and Carol Cohn who have established a new chair for social justice at the Ford School in honor of Hal's grandparents who were killed in the Holocaust and our longtime Ford School committee chair Jim Hudak has established a new chair in health policy. These campaign gifts I know some of them are deeply personal. Some members of the MPP class of 2008 are here tonight when their friend and classmate Maggie Weston passed away in 2014 tragically at the age of 32. Her parents endowed a fund in her honor. The fund provides a lasting tribute to Maggie providing fellowship and internship support to young people who are deeply committed to the same kinds of educational equity issues that Maggie championed so well and so passionately in her lifetime. Thanks to the good friend of the Ford School Hank Meyer and other admirers of President Ford we established the prestigious Gerald R. Ford Presidential Fellowship and we have so many other gifts I won't list them all tonight but gifts from the Treehand Family Fund to establish new internships and gifts from Shelley and Joel Talber to establish new ways of engaging in collective action for our students. You'll notice a theme among these fellowships and new initiatives each of them includes a significant component of applied learning engaged learning that's an integral element of our vision for the future as Liz will describe and these are just some of the many ways our alumni and friends are supporting the Ford School helping us to grow and thrive and make a bigger impact in the world. I'll briefly mention a few other highlights from a very busy year at the Ford School. We launched major new initiatives this year on leadership and something we're calling conversations across difference helping to bridge the deep divides in our country today. We've launched and we'll launch officially starting with a first class next year a one-year master of public affairs program for mid-career professionals. We've started offering concentrations for our MPP students in key areas from social policy to international development and we remain a destination for some of the country's most prominent policymakers who come to lecture and teach. Tazley Foundation policymaker in residence, Javed Ali I know is going to be here but I haven't seen him yet. He's not lurking in the audience. Okay, Javed is taught national security last year and is coming back again in the winter. We have three Tazley Foundation policymakers in residence right now with us public health expert Phyllis Meadows, FinTech expert Adrian Harris, and the Honorable Sandy Levin who joins our faculty after decades of outstanding public service in the United States Congress. And there's been more great news on the hiring front. Over the last year we've added terrific strength. Brendan Nayan who studies fake news. Robert Hampshire works on smart cities. Eduardo Montero and Yusuf Negers who study international development and most recently, I don't think we've even actually formally announced this, Charlotte Cavallier who's a comparative political scientist focused on social policy who'll be joining us from Georgetown. I opened tonight by recognizing alumni for their financial contributions and of course that's important. For our school, however, it's also just as important for our alumni to give back in other ways and we're really proud to have how active our alumni really are. You help us recruit students for example, fully 68 alumni made calls to admitted students last spring making a personal connection and encouraging them to choose the Ford School. And I'm told 88 alums have signed up for recruitment this coming year. So thank you very much and let me clap to thank those of you here who are doing it. You also very importantly and I'll say in front of our students, you hire our students for jobs and for internships. You serve on our alumni board. You share advice and connections both by email and during visits back to Ann Arbor and we're deeply grateful for that. We need your help and we welcome your engagement. I wanted to wrap up my opening remarks tonight with a word of encouragement. I know Joe Davidson was planning to be here but I'm not sure he's here yet. Is Joe here? Nope. Joe is a master's alum and a journalist who covers federal workforce issues for the Washington Post and he's had a lot to write about as you can imagine the last few weeks and years. I was especially struck by his column from last week describing the emotional and psychological toll of the government shutdown the disruption and trust and the stress that results from having one's professional mission threatened. Regardless of whether you were furloughed if you work in DC or aspire to a career in public service you're affected by the current political climate by the divisive and corrosive rhetoric around public institutions and public policy in general. The fact is your work is important. People believe in your mission. They believe in public service and they believe in the analytical communication and leadership skills we're giving to the folks who will be leading our communities for the next 50 years to come. And so please keep up the good work. We're grateful for you. We're rooting for you. We're proud of you. Go blue. And now for the main event tonight we're fortunate to be joined by one of Michigan's most distinguished faculty members our own Elizabeth Gerber. She is the Jack L Walker Collegiate Professor of Public Policy Professor of Political Science and Research Associate at the Center for Political Studies as well as the Associate Dean for Research and Engagement. Liz directs our program in practical policy engagement P3E and services our Associate Dean as I said for research and policy engagement. She's a true partner with me along with Associate Dean Paula Lance in leading the Ford School and I really couldn't imagine our future without her. Liz earned her doctorate at Michigan and then spent 10 years on the political science faculty at UC San Diego. We are fortunate to recruit her back to Michigan in 2001. Her influential research addresses the critical and challenging issues of regional governance, intergenerational cooperation and policy to enhance transportation and economic development. For that work among other things she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and I've just learned will be a DOJ award recipient tomorrow. This is one of the cool things you get to learn as your Dean. Every time I see Liz in my office I learn some extra cool thing that she is doing that I didn't know anything about and I can't plausibly know how she does all that and so much more. She's an exemplary teacher and mentor with a deeply creative and innovative approach to education. She helped reinvent our applied policy seminar course which enables our master students to engage with a supervised consulting project with real world clients. The APS is now the highlight of many master students experiences at the Ford School on a core part of our new P3E initiative as well and she's at the cutting edge using collaborative simulation software and exploring new approaches to online and hybrid learning. So with that please join me in thanking and in welcoming Liz Gerber. See if you can pull it off. Yeah well incredible touching and you know exaggerated but very nice introduction I really appreciate it and hi everybody I'm so happy to be here. I was standing over there listening and looking at all of these forties of different generation level in what you're doing in your careers but it may I honestly like got a little weepy for a second because I love the Ford School and the reason is you and teaching you and working with you and mentoring all of you has been really a highlight of my not just my career but my life I would say so thank you for that and how wonderful to be here with all of you. So as Michael said the purpose of this panel is to talk a little bit about how the Ford School is thinking right now about policy engagement in general and engaged learning as a core part of what we do as a school and both how current and future alumni can be involved. So how many of you are current alumni see how I did that so you're alumni and how many of you are future alumni. Excellent thanks so there's I'm not going to ask you for money but I am going to ask you to do the kind of work that my friends up here do which is help us with some of our engaged learning work that is so critical to the to what we do at the Ford School. So let me just be clear when I'm when I'm talking about engaged learning here there are a lot of ways to think about engagement policy engagement and engaged learning but the way that I like to think about it and and many of us at the Ford School are trying to focus on is direct explicit and mutually beneficial partnerships with people in organizations outside of the university who play a direct role in the education process. So that's either through things like the applied policy seminar where we have student teams working with real world clients on real problems not just term papers but real challenges that the organizations are facing and so and then lots of other variants on that whether that's internships whether that's short-term research assistantships whether that's helping us with policy simulations and that sort of thing but it's all about the practical art of getting stuff done. The Phil Power who's one of the generous donors that is supporting a lot of the engaged learning work that we're doing at the Ford School he's kind of a funny guy he's got a real personality a big personality but he actually likes to say we're gonna get stuff done and that's what we're learning how to do and so because I can't teach you guys that you've got to teach yourself I can create situations I can create opportunities but you've got to do that learning with help and so what we're going to talk a little bit about tonight is I've got two of our champion our A plus our superstar applied policy seminar clients Dave Lehrer and Eric Beinhardt from GAO and the Justice Department respectively talking a little bit about what they have experienced as clients with us and other universities as well in the engaged learning process and then I don't know how many excuse me many of you probably know some of our distinguished alumni who are also up here who in their day at the Ford School were students in the applied policy seminar and so we're going to ask them to each talk a little bit about the experience that they had doing engaged learning that is working with the real client during their academic time at the Ford School and how that's affected what they do now I will tell you from my perspective as a teacher it's the most rewarding kind of teaching that I can do because I well one I don't have to stand up and lecture which I don't really enjoy doing so much and nobody really likes that do they anybody like lecturing probably not I don't but what I do love is to be able to help students think through problem solving and problem solving on lots of different dimensions both vis-a-vis the client the like the hard problem but also all the soft problem solving like how do I work with my teammates how do I communicate this thing effectively how do I manage the expectations of the client that seem a bit out of out of sync with what we thought we were going to be doing and so on so from my perspective I get to watch that learning taking place but what I'm going to do now is turn it over and ask our colleagues to talk to you about how that learning took place with them and then at the end I'm going to come back and make a plea to all of you about how you can help us do more of the engaged learning work that we're doing at the Ford School so with that I'm going to turn it over to my friend and colleague Dave Lehrer from the GAO and then if you guys I'm not going to stand up here and go down the road so as each one of you finishes if you just introduce yourselves and then I'll come back up when you're done Dave great thanks thank you I'm Dave Lehrer thank you for having me I'm an assistant director of the education workforce and income security group at GAO for those you should all know what GAO is and what we do but in case you don't GAO is the investigative arm of the United States Congress we do public policy research on behalf of Congress that is sourced either through a direct request from a congressional committee of jurisdiction a mandate in law or we also do some work under what's called the controller general's authority the controller general in the United States is my boss Chris is as well and there's some other GAO people in the audience with respect to the engaged learning I well I should say my primary area of work is retirement security a financial security for an aging population I've been doing that work since about 2004 and not coincidentally I've been the liaison for recruiting for the University of Michigan at GAO since 2004 as well and not quite as long with the APS program but for a lot of years now and with respect to the program we see it as a partnership we get just as much out of the experience as you all do going through the program we start with a real world example this is not some kind of scenario this is a request that we expect to be doing we've already received from the Congress something we think that we have in the pipeline that's going to be a request very soon and so these are things that will feed to the work that you do in the applied policy seminar GAO will feed into actual GAO published work another thing that's very important is is that the experience be real and so we want you all to have the experience where you understand what it's like to do public policy research at GAO so we're going to run you through a design and scoping exercise where you will scope the work you will look at the data sources you will reach out to experts in the area you will read literature and academic research on the topic you will be providing us with your experience your summary of that information then once we have agreed on that methodology the way that the work will be applied then you'll go out and you'll do actually that work you'll collect the data and you'll analyze the data you look at the data reliability aspects up you'll go out and talk to people who have real-world experience about the issues that you're researching it may individuals at university I know they contribute a lot as well it might be people at the state level it might be at the federal level it could be folks who work in industry depending on the subject matter so you're going out and getting that academic sorry anecdotal information collecting that as well then once you've gone through done your analysis you've done your due diligence with respect to the data and the information that you've collected you'll begin to develop your message we'll bring you back online and we'll work with you to develop that message using the tools and techniques that we apply at GAO on all of our work so we will ask you to develop a message agreement document which talks about all of the things that you've learned but more importantly what that means how are you going to talk about the final results of your work in in your final product we'll work with you to develop a final product whether that is a presentation that you'll do which is probably the most common with GAO either virtually via video conferencing or more recently a lot of students have been traveling to Chicago and have been doing the presentation from there some of the teams also in addition to the presentation will also do a written report and we're happy to work with you on that as well from the standpoint of how we would like it to go obviously we want it to be a real world but we also want it to be a mentoring experience so we want to work with you through the challenges that you're facing we and to do that we schedule regular meetings I know there are several people in the audience that have worked on these projects often they're bi-weekly meetings where we'll check in you know via via Skype or WebEx and see how things are going talk about you know the information that you're learning do you have any questions about the approach that you're applying but that being said it is a real word experience but we want the experience to be the goal of the relationship we don't want the end product to be what's driving it because what we want at the end of the day is for you to have the experience of what it's like to do real world public policy analysis that's going to make a difference and to get the experience that you would have frankly if you came to GAO in terms of the quickly the subject matter just I'll pick four most recent projects because I don't want to leave anyone out so these are just the most recent I'm looking at state sponsored retirement programs retirement plan advice that's given through automatic we call robo advisors municipal scholarship programs and options to extend labor force participation of older workers so I encourage you to take advantage of this class this experience again we get probably more out of it than you all do but we just we absolutely love doing it and I believe there's gonna be a question and answer session uh as a part of this so I'll I'll in there and be happy to answer any questions that thanks my name's Eric bine art and I work for the international criminal investigative training assistance program also known as is it up we're part of the criminal division of the justice department but we have an unenviable business model and the DOJ pays for four of our staff positions and everything else comes from basically the state department from the international narcotics and law enforcement bureau inl and the counterterrorism bureau so suffice it to say we need to rely on a lot of inexpensive talent to do what we do and so I'm a huge advocate capstone um our mission at issy top is really to develop the capacity of law of developing countries law enforcement corrections and forensics operations deal to deal with transnational crime and terrorism and do it in a way that respects human rights and human dignity uh the way we do this is by promoting sustainable institutional development so let me go back quickly in 1986 when issy top was created our name made sense because all we were doing was providing criminal investigation training in Central American countries Guatemala El Salvador Honduras that was it just training that all changed in 1990 after the overthrow of Manuel Noriega and Panama so issy tap went in after the U.S. Army when things had settled down and we worked with the Panamanian government to develop a new police force from scratch so that requires a lot more than simply training it requires a lot of mentoring technical assistance developing policies procedures that build a framework of an institution that you can build upon training is obviously a part of that but it's only one part so that really began issy taps dedication to promoting sustainable institutional development there's a reason why I don't say achieve sustainable institutional development because that's very hard to do and there are a lot of outside factors that determine whether that happens a lot of them have to do with host country will and political dynamics in the country but anyway so for years we were promoting this sustainable institutional development everyone promotes sustainable institutional development INL USA different everyone does it but what does it mean what does it mean we wanted to provide concrete examples of what issy tap means when we say that we do we promote sustainable institutional development so we started by writing a basic concept paper and if you have the the diagram the colorful diagram there on the right that was basically what this concept paper was about 12 pages long laid out it was a good start but we realized we needed much more so the question became how are we going to do that with very limited resources the answer was through capstone throughout so we partnered with list on one capstone and with the Maxwell school of Syracuse on two capstones and the paper is divided into three parts so the first part is the really fleshing out this diagram and the four the four analyses that you see in the yellow section in the middle there the second part is looking at seven issy tap programs that have successfully promoted sustainable institutional development that's where Liz's capstone class was played an integral part they did a lot of research a lot of primary research all of our capstones require tremendous amount of primary research reaching out to issy tap program managers in the field academia experts we strongly believe that primary research is essential to good capstone projects the third and final section was the monitoring and evaluation section we have not done a good job the last 33 years in monitoring and evaluating our pro our programs fortunately no one else has either so we decided that this was a good opportunity to make a bold step and so the work of the three capstones was phenomenal this is the final product which was published in 2018 by the justice department and I hope I don't like to exaggerate but I would if somebody asked me to estimate how much the capstones were worth I would I would say that I think the three capstone we could not have gotten a better value if we had paid a consultant $150,000 to do this work and I've worked with a lot of consultants on a lot of good things so we've done 26 capstones in the last six years with eight different universities we rely on capstones for developing curricula for a set up programs around the world for strategic planning purposes for all sorts of research so we are big believers in capstones and one of our distinguished capstone alumna alumni's here Paula but again I just want to thank uh Michigan and Liz particularly for being great partners in this endeavor thank you at Manning I'm class of 2015 so I came to this project with the students side so I worked with the city of Lansing to develop a regional recycling model so the idea was the fourth largest city in Michigan didn't have any sport cycling and how do we solve that perhaps by pooling resources of localities around township some of the suburbs perhaps you could have one facility that the recycling resources could go to and I thought being from Michigan that we had a 10-cent deposit this is easy right and we know recycling like it's in our blood not really so it turns out Michigan has a terrible recycling rate you look at the city of Detroit I at least I can use 2013 they did not have municipal recycling in the largest city in Michigan I don't know what's happened in four years but I don't think they have it still you're spoiled the city like DC we just have a giant loop in you dump everything in so we went into this we sort of assembled our crack APS team working with the city of Lansing you know we had the state a guy we had the excel guy I guess I was the guy with the car so that was sort of like my really important role with the guy with the car were there any gals yeah I'm sorry yeah there was as the only but so every week we made our commute up to the Lansing and then we went to some of the townships and really the communities around because there's a lot going on and Michigan has some interesting laws what comes out what's a township what's a county what's a city things I really hadn't thought about very much I just thought oh the city of Lansing I didn't understand that there's a very wealthy township that's right next to it that has certain stakes so working with a really diverse group of stakeholders we got a lot of insight and everybody's already a different you know stake in this and it was really valuable being a student being able to see okay here's what the city of Lansing thinks as the big the giant in the room here's what the wealthy township thing says someone who has the resources here's what the county thinks is the largest landholder in the area and sort of putting all these pieces together with our team so we tried to put together a kind of a model this idea that if you had a municipal recycling facility that was used sort of as a shared resource by all these stakeholders that you might better have something there and so I remember we were driving down for our final presentation so we spent you know 10 12 weeks meeting with our clients kind of throughout the area and the day we're driving down I remember was also the fourth school cookie day I don't know if you guys don't do that but we had this thing where it's like you know I remember just like highly cookies I was like I gotta leave for the day I'm gonna like get like a whole napkin's worth so I'm like driving I get like cookie like all over myself like frosting it's kind of like gross and I didn't really realize that until I'm like walking into the Lansing mayor's office I'm like oh I have like frosting all over my face you know like I'm like nervous like this is the worst-case scenario and we walk in like a group of another six of us and we do our presentation and the whole time I'm just thinking like this was terrible you know we we didn't do a good job like you know we produced this deliverable we were up all night working on it and then I looked around the room and realized that half of what we had accomplished was bringing those people together it was bringing the city of Lansing with Meridian Township with Ingham County and that sometimes you have these sort of externalities that come out of these and so yes we produced a 30-page paper those read by you know someone hopefully but I think the greater value we had was getting all these people together and give them talking because so often that's lost and this is something I carried to my own professional world so I work the part of energy doing appropriations work and a lot of what it is just getting the right people in the room to talk about this stuff and I think that APS really helped me learn about that and I'm really happy that this program exists and I you know thanks for that so happy to talk more about that but sometimes I just be getting the right people in the room get accomplished a lot everyone good evening my name is Ryan Peterson I'm currently work with Booz Allen Hamilton I'm an IT project manager and agile coach over there but then I'll start with my APS and how I got to that point so I remember you know a lot of classwork we get all the background in economics and how we can do all these improvements and a theory behind everything and then really excited to take the APS course because now we can start applying it right and I went into grad school wanting to do government consulting so landed in the right spot for me but this is like a real old example where I can start you know giving my dimethene the water a little bit and so I think one of the things that surprised me about it though was not that I could come in so my project was with a county veterans affairs office and so we come in and they're trying to do better outreach and to reach out to more of their veterans in the county and so there's some clear ways that we could come in and help and get some more targeted approaches and some better ways to have some communication strategies but that wasn't I thought that would be the big part turns out that was a smaller aspect of the work that we did a lot more of it was dealing with the people and how you interact how you communicate that to a client and so that really became apparent that this project wasn't about just advising on a policy that you could do but actually how you have to work with people and then do it together to implement that policy was really important something to learn not only that but understanding the culture of an organization and how they interact with each other so that was really helpful and I was actually able to partly that into my next job which was working for a smaller firm called Empower Strategies but they were the client was the veterans affairs so I got that job because in the interview they asked me about the veterans affairs culture and understanding that culture and being able to say oh Ryan can jump in and really understand because there is a learning curve to not just being able to advise people properly but how you advise people on how you communicate that properly is very important. One of the other aspects I learned from the APS project was that we had to kind of self-manage our team and as a project manager I still use some of the skills to this day so for my team I remember we had the behavioral test that we did I can't remember we still do that it's a strengths finder and so you know a lot of teams and your career projects to go all right we'll just divvy up everything equally and our team said no we're not going to do that we said what do you like to do what's your strengths you do that doesn't matter if that's 60 percent or 80 percent we all said that's that's how we're going to divvy up and actually everyone was happier that way too and so it's something I actually bring to my team is is where are your strengths what are strengths do you want to pursue and help and so that's utilized today so I'm still still applying that into my current career so I was in the veterans affairs after that so I guess more about me after that so I worked with veterans affairs a veterans veterans management system so when veterans started to go outside of the VA network so I worked on the IT infrastructure for that after that I moved on to the IRS so that's been interesting now with the budget budget stuff that's going on so we've been a little bit affected by that but we're struggling through but I started on private debt collection so that was an infrastructure bill the finance roads bridges through getting more debt brought into the IRS also did country by country so that's if you have a billion dollar organizations that have international locations there's actually not communication between those countries and so to bridge that tax gap we're starting communication channels the center of the IT infrastructure to have that communication my I also worked on data strategy and I'm currently on web applications so I suggest all of you to go to irs.gov backslash account you can actually log in you can see if you owe the IRS any money it's right there we also have identified identified best verification so it's been stolen like that so but it's a great great projects and this little website and team that we're pretty spartan is generating billions of dollars so it's really cool work to be part of hi I'm chris falcon I'm graduating the class of 2014 and I enjoyed a poly policy seminar so much that I did twice so first I worked with an economic development coordinator for the city of adrian michigan and to show you how real world our project was it was sold to us when we signed up as doing a research project to help them understand equity crowdfunding and how it could be leverages a tool to help their local community raise funds from within the community support local businesses week one project shifted the michigan legislature was considering an equity crowdfunding bill so instead of doing primarily research about this topic we became advocates and trying to work with the city of adrian and other stakeholders to get this bill shepherded through the michigan legislature about a lot of networking relationship building skills talking with legislators and legislators and other stakeholders throughout the state of michigan and I'd say the culmination of that part of the project was that our team actually had the privilege of testifying in front of the michigan house commerce committee about some of the work that we did really a rewarding experience and the bill actually was enacted that year during during our project which is also very fulfilling but we also wanted to take the project a step further because you know when a bill gets passed that's great but what happens next how do people know about the bill what's the risks how does it actually get implemented so the second part of our project was working with local stakeholders and helping them develop implementation guides and guidance for local businesses and and individuals who might want to invest in their own local community and this really prepared me for the real world in taking a real world issue getting flipped on its head right from week one seeing an issue from multiple sides and then strategizing within a very limited period of time on how how to implement this into an actual solution for the local community and my second project was actually working with a GAO team with Dave actually looking at retirement security and specifically employee coverage with employer sponsored retirement plans so needless to say very different than the first project it was very data intensive and I think Dave's description was right on talking to a lot of stakeholders understanding and researching the available data sources working with the data sources working with the GAO experts understanding their process taking a very broad subject and scoping it down into a researchable question and then executing coming up analyzing the data coming up with our message presenting our findings and producing that 20 30 page report which you read right we did so one way that that experience really shaped my professional career is that I now work at the GAO I am a senior analyst with our strategic issues team and I focus largely on human capital management and the 2020 census so this project really gave a great insight into how the GAO works now every time I'm having new projects I go through very exactly the same process that we did on that project we get a fairly broad topic we break it down into researchable questions we think about the methods about how we will answer that question we do the research take some time and then we come back develop our message and produce our report so it was a very it was a very rewarding experience and really showed what work was like at the GAO yes hi my name is Claire Hutchinson I am also in the class of 2014 I'm currently on the corporate affairs team at Humana so I also fell in the same campus Chris in that I liked my APS project so much that I did it twice and I worked with a team that worked with the Heaton Warp Fund which is in Detroit and it's a nonprofit that provides utility assistance for low-income families in Michigan they provide about 15 million dollars annually and so when we started our projects they said to us we have tons of data tell us what to do with our data and didn't give us a lot of direction they had lots of things that they would have considered quote-unquote databases or data sets that they kind of sent our way and said help us understand our customers and part of the Heaton Warp Fund was that they had a hub and spoke model so they have one nonprofit agency that works with about 40 different community centers within the state of Michigan and they were very focused on tell us about the people that ultimately benefit from our grants and they were kind of missing the fact that there was another step between them and the ultimate beneficiary and that was their community centers so when we started kind of working on the project we met with various groups that were responsible for providing grants directly to beneficiaries and what we quickly learned was the relationship between the nonprofit organization Thaw and their community partners was not very strong and so when we were kind of working with our clients they were expecting us to come back and say here's all the different people that you serve and here's how you get them engaged and we kind of got to the end of our project and we said no the message is really you need to have better engagement with your community centers so Liz really gave us a pep talk and was like you guys can go and provide like a message that isn't going to be great nobody likes to hear you have a partner organization that's not happy with you so we went and we kind of shared this feedback and they were really receptive because it was about the message of you know you want to ultimately serve people better but we've missed a part here and as part of that and their reception to it we said there were two of us my co-partner is actually here Christine Wagner and we worked together and said we're going to do another semester and we're going to help you figure out how you kind of build this relationship between your partner organizations so as part of that we went out and collected actual data on the partner organizations and we said you know this these places provide WIC funding and these places help with tax assistance and we basically were able to put together profiles of all of the different services that their partner organizations provided and then they were able to say oh this is the profile of the type of services that our partner provides and if we want to have a good relationship with our partner we need to know what our partner is actually doing in the community so as part of that we also provided a whole host of recommendations as to how they could improve engagement among their kind of partner agencies and that ranged everything from you know doing monthly calls to having a newsletter that spotlighted various different organizations and following the issues that these types of organizations would be really attuned to to understand the cyclical nature of their business so I think that in working through that really learning from the you know it's not fun to deliver a hard message but it is ultimately going to be most important and I think the theme that a lot of people set up here is we started out on one path and we ended up somewhere totally and completely different and I think that that happens to all of us in the real world like I think that everybody can highlight lots of different professional situations where you may take a job and think your one job is going to be in you know your role is going to be very specific and it's going to fit in a square box and that doesn't end up the way it works at the end of the day so I think that it was a really wonderful opportunity to kind of continue learning working with people getting through the points you know difficult situations and working with a wide variety of people to ultimately serve a client in a very you know in an effective way so thank you for sharing your experiences it was it was really fun for me to relive some of the good and challenging moments in all of those so excuse me thank you for that okay I'm going to be extremely brief for you future alumni in other words current students for are any of you for some of you are first years or are you all second years okay for your first years take the APS in the fall and I can't guarantee what will happen because that's kind of the nature as Claire said so well but you will learn a lot and it will be I think a memorable and important part of your Ford school experience so that's for the first year students second year students you're going to be out there in the world so start thinking about ways that you can work with Ford school students as capstone APS type on projects with students over the next few years and when you get your good ideas bring them to me and Cindy who's back here and we are really excited to be able to expand the both the opportunities for APS and the number of students who are engaging in them so that's for our future alumni current alumni bring us your projects as you heard from Dave and Eric you know there are huge benefits to having students spending a dozen weeks working from their perspective a little bit outside of the day to day they can take a step back see things that you might not be able to see add capacity add ideas add energy and we can create these really great experiences so please contact me anytime and I would love to talk even if you don't have a fully fleshed out idea if you think you have a good idea for an APS project I don't even want to say what a good idea is because they can be so many different things but if it's something that's important to your organization that you think some students could productively work on and help you with come and talk to me about them okay all right so we're in time but we've got a reception where's Elizabeth is she in the room can we have a just a few questions you think Peter okay all right so let's take if anybody has questions for the panelists that you'd like to ask now and again we'll we'll be heading out for reception after but any questions anybody have any questions how about how in the world did that bill become a law in less than like eight weeks how about that that's my question I don't know if I had much to do with that it was a good just bringing a lot of stakeholders together and really getting people to see the value from all sides like like Matt said bringing people into the same room they do not Martha do you know that's good I don't think that existed four years ago I didn't ask anyone we have a very loose organization seriously that's the upside of your budget model yeah exactly we have no money but we can do anything we want but no it's uh I've been there a long time I've been there when we started the these programs I've been there 15 years and so I had a pretty good idea of what what our priorities were and I talked with our director and you know our senior management and they gave me a lot of latitude just to do stuff so you know and then I was fortunate to meet Liz and other great faculty and you know they're very creative too and the students it was just a synergy of very loose creativity the office that I work at GAO the education workforce and income security team education's a big part of that and my boss has children that went to the University of Michigan she roots for the football team that plays in Ann Arbor and so it was a very easy sell to her to bring these projects in after she saw them cycle through a couple of times then it wasn't even a question anymore so it's a system now that we have in place to be able to have this on a recurring basis and sometimes in the fall and again in the winter term so it's great I will say from from a faculty perspective what I've seen is the more engaged the partners are the clients are the better the experiences both for the students but also for the partners right so you know nobody has time for anything of course but it's time well spent with the students and so from the from my perspective in just observing the dynamics you know once the once once the organization meets the students it's it's a good thing like nobody thinks oh man these darn students what a burden and so as Dave said you know both in the current moment working with the students but then also when the conversation comes up like should we do this again it there there are huge benefits on both sides so sometimes getting your foot in the door and just sort of making the space for it I think is sort of what I'm hearing your question but however you can do that in your organization it's it's it's it's kind of like you know the second date is easier than the first date in this case because usually the first date goes pretty well so there's huge benefits sitting right to my left see yeah exactly another question I believe it's time for a reception so thank you all so much have a wonderful trip those of you who are current students I hope you learn a lot make good connections and for all of you alumni welcome back and keep in touch and go blue great Liz and panel let me just say as you go out you'll see there on the tables there are a little tense and say what topic area if you're gathered at that table you might find somebody who can anchor the conversation around that topic but feel free to mingle around talk to anyone you want to visit with the staff with the faculty with our alums with our students and I have a great time thank you