Feature

Recent Graduate Spotlight: Madeleine Sumption

When London-native Madeleine Sumption, MPP'08 went home to visit, she noticed an influx of Polish immigrants starting in 2004-when Poland joined the European Union.

"Suddenly everyone knew loads of Polish people," she said. "If you walk in central London you hear Polish being spoken on the street every twenty seconds and there are Polish shops all over the place. And it happened in such a short period of time that it was just really interesting."

For her honors thesis, Sumption looked towards home and studied this increase of Polish immigrants from 2004 to 2007 and their use of informal networks to find employment. She determined that Poles (between the ages of 18 and 35) were more likely (up to 20 percentage points) over the four-year period to use friends, relatives, or other acquaintances to find jobs. Networking was most common in London because of its large population. But the longer Poles were in the United Kingdom-and presumably became more integrated-the less they leaned on these social connections for employment.

Additionally, Sumption looked at the labor market implications and determined that informal job referrals may lower employer recruitment costs. But, she also found that Polish workers are more sensitive as a whole to temporary changes in employment rates and that reliance on social networks may create social divisions as Poles are often concentrated in low-skilled industries.

This summer, Sumption has been working on publishing her thesis. She recently started working as a policy analyst at a think tank that is "absolutely ideal" for her interests-the Migration Policy Institute in Washington, DC.

Sumption had already been working in the policy field in London before starting at the Harris School, but she did not have a policy background. So she had to learn a lot on the job, which did not always make her very efficient.

"There was nothing systematic about the way that I was learning," she said. "It was quite haphazard, so I figured if I could just sit down for two years and learn a lot of [the trends and principles] that get repeated, then I could come back and things would get much faster."

Initially, the Harris School's heavy quantitative focus concerned Sumption given her liberal arts background. She said, "If I'd had a vision into the future two years ago and saw how quantitative my thesis would be, I would have been stunned."

But, she said the faculty really taught her how to analyze policy issues. In fact, some of her classes-particularly Political Economy for Public Policy and labor economics with Steans Family Professor Kerwin Charles-will stand out from her Harris School experience. "It sounds dramatic to say you become a different person after this, but the way you think does change."