In my last editorial column as School Director, it is my absolute pleasure to introduce our incoming School Director, Dr. Angela Eikenberry, to our public service community, students, alumni and non-UConn colleagues. Dr. Eikenberry will be the leader who takes the School of Public Policy (SPP) to the next level in terms of teaching, research, service and subsequently our local, state, national and international reputation. In the next couple of paragraphs, I would like to indulge in celebrating what Team SPP has done in the past seven years.
Congratulations to our graduates. This year SPP celebrated 84 graduates from our Master of Public Administration (MPA), Master of Public Policy (MPP) and Master of Arts in Survey Research and Data Analysis (SRDA) programs. Our four graduate certificate programs also honored their graduates. Governor Lamont delivered an excellent graduation keynote that demonstrated his deep appreciation for public service professionals. Admitting students into our programs, preparing them to be the best professionals and graduating them to serve our public and nonprofit agencies is the mission of our School and the most important thing that we do. In the past seven years, we graduated about 500 amazing professionals who are now doing exceptionally competent public service work. Our team of faculty, staff and alumni (yes, alumni are part of our team) is proud of every one of these graduates.
We also celebrated the graduation of 25 leaders who went through our Encore Connecticut program this year, as well as 10 Emerging Nonprofit Leaders of Color in our third cohort that we run in cooperation with The Community Foundation for Greater New Haven. These programs are part of our outreach to Connecticut residents and are critical to our mission of preparing future and current leaders for employment in the public and nonprofit sectors. Consistent with that mission is also the success of our six year old Public Service Executive Leadership Collaborative (PSELC) which provided quality training to about 300 public servants this year, and more than 1,200 over the past six years. PSELC provides an important continuing education resource to our public service community, alumni and executive students.
Our team has accomplished plenty in the last seven years. Thanks to our hard-working faculty, our funded research revenue is up ten-fold, our revenues have more than doubled and our scholarly research has also increased substantially. Thanks to our staff, our MPA, MPP and Fellows programs have healthy enrollments. Our expansion into Stamford as of this Fall will undoubtedly be successful.
Our internship program is as healthy as ever and our student job placement rate is second to none. Our faculty is more diverse than ever and our student body is also substantially more diverse than ever. Our alumni, who have always been our biggest asset, are more engaged than ever in our program through our internship program, through our continuing education program and through our mentoring program.
I am very proud of everything our team of faculty, staff, alumni and students accomplished together. I came to UConn because of its amazing reputation in the fields of public policy and public administration. After seven years of leading the now-School of Public Policy, I am more convinced than ever that we have amazing days ahead of us. I want to thank our students, faculty, staff, alumni and public and nonprofit leaders for all they did to help us succeed in the past seven years. I look forward to working with them in my new capacity as a Professor in the School starting August 2024.
– Mohamad Alkadry, SPP Professor and School Director