Making a Difference: Alumni Profiles

Carolyn J. Hill (PhD’01) | Alfredo Gomez (MPP’91)

Carolyn J. Hill (PhD’01)

As an assistant professor at the Georgetown Public Policy Institute, Carolyn Hill (PhD’01) is training the next generation of public policy students. Hill came to the Harris School with a desire to blend a wide set of interests into a program of study. “I’ve always been interested in both individual and organizational factors in public policies — across a broad range of policy issues,” she says. “I thought that a policy school was the best place to put these interests together.” The Harris School offered her that opportunity.

When she isn’t in the classroom teaching quantitative methods, program evaluation, or public management courses, Hill conducts research focused on the design and management of publicly supported programs, particularly those that serve poor or near-poor families. Her dissertation examined whether and why clients of some welfare-to-work offices fared better than clients at other offices, and she has continued this line of research. She is currently working on a project that examines collaboration among public schools and other organizations. Hill has co-authored a book (with the Sydney Stein, Jr., Professor of Public Management, Emeritus Laurence E. Lynn, Jr., and fellow Harris School alumna Carolyn J. Heinrich, PhD’95): Improving Governance: A New Logic for Empirical Research. She has also worked with researchers at MDRC, a nonprofit and nonpartisan research organization dedicated to issues concerning the well-being of low-income populations, to examine the management, organization, and performance of welfare-to-work programs.

Hill continually draws on the rigorous quantitative coursework that the Harris School demanded, in both the classroom and her research.

“My years at the Harris School were challenging in a lot of ways, but I grew into it. The core courses and electives provided a technical base and a great exercise of the mind—how to think and analyze critically. For research purposes, these skills are incredibly important.”

“The Harris School also had good street credentials,” she says. “I knew I needed a solid skill set and a school with a good reputation, so Chicago was a good choice. People know that the Harris School emphasizes quantitative methods and theory-based policy study.”

The advice she gives her students? “Know your quantitative skills—you can always get a job with those skills.”

In the end, she says, “I made some great friends at the Harris School, and we learned a lot from the program and from each other. The Harris School was the right thing for me, the right mix.”

Barbara Ray

Alfredo Gomez (MPP’91)

In his job as senior analyst on the U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO), Natural Resources and Environment team, Alfredo Gomez (MPP’91) has studied how the United States implemented the property protection provisions of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo of 1848 with Mexico, assessed the eco-system restoration effort of the South Florida Everglades, developed recommendations to ensured that federal lands are properly restored after oil production in Alaska ceases, and determined the extent to which Native American villages are threatened by flooding and erosion and the cost to protect or relocate the villages from these events.

As an independent, nonpartisan agency that exists to support the Congress in meeting its constitutional responsibilities, the GAO and Gomez’ work is about improving government. “That’s always our goal,” he says.

“I always tell new people that working at the GAO is like writing a master’s thesis. You’re presented with a problem or question,” he says, and “asked to design an approach or methodology to pursue, to survey people or collect data, analyze the data, and write a cogent report.”

The process, however, is not always straight-forward. Sometimes, as in the case of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo project, gathering the necessary information requires more than simple data collection. Gomez and his team were asked by Congress to determine how the United States had implemented property protections as outlined in a treaty signed after the Mexican-American war. The original land grants dated back over 150 years to Mexico and Spain. “It was a unique job,” he says. “It was difficult to find people who knew anything about it. The only experts were historians or academicians who focused on land grant issues. So we sort of became experts on the issue.”

Gomez’s training at the Harris School has proved valuable in all of his projects. While the technical background helps, he says, “the GAO looks for good analytical skills in people who are quantitatively trained.”

Having these analytical skills, for example, was essential in a project on the South Florida Ecosystem Restoration Initiative, a $15 billion project that will take as long as 50 years to complete. Because a key component of the restoration initiative is acquiring land for storing water, building water quality treatment areas, and restoring habitats, Gomez was required to determine what the Department of the Interior had done to ensure that it had maximized the acreage acquired with $200 million in grants. To accomplish this Gomez reviewed applicable laws, regulations, and agreements, and the criteria for allocating grant funds. It also required analyzing data on hundreds of parcels acquired to determine how the grant funds were expended, and how the federal and state governments shared the costs.

“A lot of our work requires a lot of conceptual thinking, and I think the approach at the Harris School of interdisciplinary coursework coupled with the quantitative prepares you for that.”

Being a good and accurate writer is also important, he says. “We have to cite every single sentence in every report—either to a document, an analysis, or something. We can’t make mistakes. When your client is the Congress and the American people, you have to be accurate—and we are.”

For more information on the U.S. General Accounting Office, its roles and responsibilities, or to read any of its reports, visiti www.gao.gov.

Barbara Ray