Welcome January 2020 Online Cohort!

Hello everyone!

Happy New Year & welcome back to the school year!

I am not sure about y’all, but the MPA program is super excited to begin this semester. Want to know why? Well…it’s because we have NEW students! We want to extend a huge congratulations and WELCOME to our January 2020 online cohort!!! This group comes to us with an interesting background and diverse perspectives. Here are some cool things to know about our new students

DEMOGRAPHICS

We have quite the group starting this January in our online program. Demographically, our new students are coming to our program from Minnesota, Alaska, California, Florida, New Jersey, and more! See below to see exactly which states and how many students.

Highlighted states with corresponding number of students coming into our 2020 January Online Cohort.

And as far as the gender-binary goes, we have almost an even 50-50 split; This cohort has 11 female students and 10 male students! The cohort’s average is 34 years old, which shows that they are bringing their own wealth of knowledge and experience into the program!

EXPERIENCE 

Speaking of experience…this cohort has an average of 10+ years of working experience! Four of the new students utilized our new local government employee tuition match scholarship! Of those four, two were firefighters, one was the head of a local government IT department, and the last one was a town manager. The cohort has two other students with a military background. Also, they have three students transitioning from working in the private sector to working in the public sector. Can you imagine the fruitful conversations that will be happening during their class times?

INTERESTS

Given the students’ diversity of experience and location, it is to be expected that they would have diverse interests as well. (And it’s true!) Their interests range from healthcare administration to IT in local government to financial management in state government. We even have one student who is interested in running for office! A long with their personal and career interests, the January 2020 online cohort expressed varying areas of interest in the MPA program. 

The majority of our incoming students expressed interest in local government (8) and nonprofit management (7). However, the cohort also has students interested in state government (4) and federal government (2).

All in all, we are so very happy to welcome our January 2020 online cohort! We can’t wait to see where the MPA takes our new students.