Hometown
Grand Rapids, Michigan
Undergraduate education
Philosophy and economics, Wheaton College
Employer
Wisconsin Legislative Fiscal Bureau (LFB)
Job Title
Fiscal Analyst
Start Date
June 2024
Primary job responsibilities
My assignment at the LFB is with the Health and Family Services team, and I focus on a set of state programs at the Departments of Health Services and Children and Families. Our office acts as the career, civil, nonpartisan staff to the legislature’s Joint Finance Committee. I manage our team’s approach to Medicaid hospital and provider reimbursement, public health, Supplemental Security Income, state payments to counties for social services, and child welfare. On a daily basis, my role is to serve legislative offices with questions on state fiscal policy, bills needing fiscal estimates generated, or developments to legislation moving through the Joint Finance Committee. Inside the six months from approximately January to June of each odd-numbered year, I am working overtime with everyone else here at the LFB to see to it that the state budget is passed.
Describe a project that best illustrates your job
We just wrapped up a document summarizing the governor’s budget bill, which is one of the key roles for our office! The next step of the state’s biennial budget process is for the legislature to deliberate on what items from the governor’s agenda they would like to hang on to for further debate. They’ll use our summary to make those decisions, and of those items that they’d like to hang on to our team will write a variety of memos presenting background, analysis, criteria, and action alternatives for legislators to consider. This is exactly the kind of work La Follette prepared me for, and it’s the signature project our office undertakes.
How do you use what you learned at La Follette on the job?
Different jobs will certainly vary, but mine is heavily focused on two things: technical accuracy and editorial correctness. La Follette gave me a much better appreciation for both of those aspects of policy writing. Classes like our mandatory statistics class showed me how much impact subtle differences in writing can have on the meaning of a statement like, in my role, speaking statistically, what fiscal effect we “estimate” or “predict” some initiative might have. Additionally, my State and Local Finance class gave me an appreciation for the uncertainty implicit in the “unexpected consequences” and second-order effects of policy in government finance. Completing a capstone alongside my classmates approximated the editorial work we do very well, with many iterations of multiple revisions taking place for all of our documents at the LFB over the course of months. In my last semester I was also able to take a class led by a former Wisconsin state budget director that has proven to be excellent preparation for my current role.
Which experiences and skills in particular helped you get your job?
Writing succinctly and neutrally is key for my work here at the LFB, and our hiring process involves a writing assessment that gives hiring managers here the ability to assess applicants’ ability to evaluate a proposed program fairly and completely without becoming lost in wordy digressions. Classes like PA 873 Introduction to Policy Analysis sharpened my writing abilities in those respects, and I remember reminding myself of what I learned in that class about the “basics” of how to communicate professionally as a policy expert while writing my assessment memo. In short, the core set of skills La Follette teaches were identical to what my employer was looking for!
Why MPA?
I graduated from my undergrad program in 2018 and joined Teach For America. I spent four years teaching as a high school special education teacher in Indianapolis, and saw firsthand how public policy decisions in areas as disparate as education, fiscal policy, urban development, credentialing and workforce development, food policy, higher education policy, policing, social services and welfare programs, and housing policies could come together, the great mass of them, to shape the lives of children so acutely in the focal point of the school they attend. I was lucky to be able to spend a couple of summers working with the mayor’s office in Indianapolis, a local Indianapolis nonprofit community organization, and the Indiana State Board of Education, and saw a lot to like in the work that people with professional preparation in policy were doing. I enjoyed teaching, but I decided that I wanted to have an impact at a higher register, and felt that an MPA was the right step for me to transition my lived experiences into a real professional capacity to do good things in the policy space. I care deeply about finding the correct answers to difficult questions, and the La Follette School prepared me to do just that.
Why the La Follette School?
I did consider other MPA programs! As a younger person I thought that law school would be right for me, but I wouldn’t do it now – an MPA was best for me. I was accepted to three private programs and three public programs, and Wisconsin was on the list because my partner grew up in Kenosha, Wisconsin. After learning more about my options, however, the La Follette School was the best choice by far. Almost all of my classmates and I were able to enter La Follette, from our first semester, with a position that paid our tuition and provided us with a modest stipend. The next best financial offer I received was a break-even proposition in a city I did not know and did not expect to remain in for more than the time I was in my program. Financial reasons aside, however, the La Follette School seemed unique in its size and student to faculty ratio. Those observations were borne out in practice, with faculty and staff extremely accessible and uniformly interested in our success as professionals. That personalized attention was a key difference-maker for me, and I can’t recommend the La Follette School enough.
Assistantship while at La Follette
I began my two years at the La Follette School as a teaching assistant (TA) for the introductory class at the business school, PPFB (which I loved doing!), and then transitioned in my second semester into a project assistantship (PA) with the Early Childhood Health Consultation (ECHC) program at UW’s School of Human Ecology (SoHE). I also worked as a TA for Dr. Melody Harvey’s Consumer Science policy analysis class in SoHE in my second semester, and then became a research assistant (RA) for Dr. Ross Milton over the summer between my two years at La Follette. In my third semester I took on a research assistantship with Dr. Harvey, and was concurrently interning with the national non-profit CDFI (Community Development Financial Institution) Rural LISC, an arm of Local Initiatives Support Corporation. In my final semester, with a capstone client project to attend to, I pared all that back to focus on my PA with ECHC. The most important one to talk about, from my perspective, was my PA with ECHC. I was able to engage in real, hands-on program management tasks on the job while I was a student in a way that made it possible for me to honestly say that I had experience with a variety of specific skills by the time I graduated. From social media management and advertising to legal research and standards development, I believe that the proximity I had to real-world ECE practitioners and genuine work in that space was a key selling point to potential employers once I graduated.
What impact did your client-based projects have on your education and/or career?
My client-based project was excellent training for my current role, despite the distinctness of the subject of the project. I worked with a team of three of my classmates to create a panel of recommendations for how our client, Alliant Energy, might take action to improve affordability for their customers who struggle to pay their energy bills. The problem was, like any good project , it was tough and a multifaceted one. Some people on our team were experienced in energy policy and utility rate analysis, but I was not, and I didn’t intend to move into energy policy in the future. Even so, it was exceptionally rewarding to engage in the involved process of divergently seeking out possible answers to the broad question posed to us, convergently homing in on answers that could set off productive change in the organization, and designing our report to best convey the complexity of the issues at hand.
Most challenging experience at the La Follette School
PA 818 Introduction to Statistical Methods for Public Policy Analysis was a class that introduced me to a skillset I had never had practical or academic experience with in the past, and I had to grow very quickly into those abilities to succeed. I had never taken a college math class before, never coded in Stata (or at all…), and of course had a pack of other classes competing for my attention. With that said…
Most rewarding experience at the La Follette School
PA 818! As difficult as it was, I felt like I was learning something new in every single class period, and I wanted to complete an MPA in part to diversify my abilities into a stronger set of quantitative and technical skills. In combination with other classes, I gained a new appreciation for the subtlety of statements researchers make and became more confident in my ability to read research critically.
Are you involved with wan volunteer activities?
I am! This past semester I volunteered as a debate coach and judge for the Madison West High School debate team, allowing me to get involved again with an activity I loved in college. I also spent time while at the La Follette School as a volunteer income tax assistant, and hope to return to that work in the future.
Mentors
I had so many people at the La Follette School who made it clear that they were prepared to write me a letter of recommendation! The friends I made in the program are still friends, and some of the best I’ve made in my entire life. I am so grateful for the La Follette community, and I know they still have my back.
Favorite Madison restaurant …
You have to try Paul’s Pel’meni while you’re in town! Definitely my favorite restaurant overall, and a great place to go if you want a sense of what student-friendly spaces and places in Madison are like. If you’re in the mood for a book and coffee, check out Leopold’s, which is more graduate student-coded than Paul’s, but can be a bit pricey.