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VOICEOVER: This is Alumni Aloud, a podcast by Graduate Center students for Graduate Center students. In each episode, we talk with the GC graduate about their career path, the ins and outs of their current position, and the career advice they have for students. This series is sponsored by the Graduate Center’s Office of Career Planning & Professional Development. 

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JACK DEVINE, HOST: So now we’ll turn to our panel on making a difference GC alumni and advocacy and public policy. The Graduate Center celebrates its commitment to contributing to the public good. Many of us achieve that through our research and teaching, but how can we turn our theory into practice outside of academia after graduation? Many of our alumni have continued fighting for what they believe in through their careers working for nonprofits, unions, and other institutions committed to advocacy and public policy. Today we’re joined by two distinguished GC graduates who’ll speak about how they’ve connected their experience in graduate school to their jobs while sharing their experiences of day-to-day life in a unique sector of the economy. So we’re joined by Ruth Delaney, a PhD in sociology, who is the Initiative Director for Unlocking Potential at the Vera Institute of Justice. and Sam Stein, PhD in Earth and Environmental Sciences, who is a Housing Policy Analyst at the Community Service Society. Thank you both so much for joining us. Yeah, thanks for inviting us. 

SAMUEL STEIN, GUEST: Yeah, thank you. 

DEVINE: Great. So I just want to begin with the first question about kind of your life on the job as it is right now. So what is the day-to-day work of your current role, and I’ll throw that to Ruth first. 

RUTH DELANEY, GUEST: Sure. So I’d love to give some context about where I work first and then talk about what I do all day. But so we’re a national nonprofit organization, the Vera Institute of Justice. We’ve been around a long time. We were founded in 1961. And our goal is to end mass incarceration, ensure a fair and accountable justice system for everyone, and build safe and thriving communities across the country. And we do that by using research, data analysis, communications, policy expertise, all different kinds of strategies to demonstrate how tough-on-crime rhetoric does not work, and sensible evidence-based solutions do work to contribute to greater safety, accountability, and justice for everyone.  

So currently, my job as initiative director, I direct the work we do at Vera to increase opportunities for good jobs for people leaving prison. We’re starting some new work this year after having supported the implementation of college in prison programs since 2012, work that I was actually able to see from start to finish in my time at VERA. But during that time, we piloted work with colleges and corrections agencies. We successfully advocated for the reinstatement of Pell Grants to incarcerated people at the federal level. and assisted state coalitions to implement the new regulations with an eye always on what would be in the best interests of students in prison. In that project, we worked with 200 colleges in all 50 states, the Bureau of Prisons, and Puerto Rico. So it was a big body of work, and it was a lot of fun to do.  

And with that context, my day-to-day will probably make a little bit more sense. Right now, we are back in learning mode in my kind of realm of Vera. So my colleagues and I right now are seeking to build out a new area of work. And alongside that, we’re building our knowledge and skills on the subject of employment after prison. Specifically, we want to get people into living wage jobs that support their success as they move from a job, just any job, towards a career. Lately, my days have looked more or less like this. I’m doing a lot of learning, and that means reading academic and policy literature, attending conferences and presentations, speaking with practitioners and subject matter experts, and reviewing policies, laws, and regulations in place in the states that we’re hoping to work. I’m also spending a lot of time connecting with partners. We’re piloting a career pipeline in two states. That’s kind of the goal of the next couple of years. And our first state is just about to sign its MOU, so I can’t quite say which state it is yet, but that will launch the project. And while we’re waiting on that, my colleagues and I are speaking with partners in that state, getting to know the jurisdictions and the major issues at play there, and identifying companies engaged in second-chance hiring in the regions that we are planning to work.  

Another thing I’m spending time on right now is developing funding proposals. So in the last week, I’ve had a nice week in this realm because I’ve had two opportunities to engage with funders. And this means explaining our work on a call and following up with a summary and writing, usually. This is something that I’ll then send on to our contact at the foundations that we’re speaking with, and I get to send it, but it’s actually something that’s produced by a lot of people here at Vera. I get to work with really smart people in our development department, our finance department, and then the colleagues on my team as well to kind of develop the idea and write it all down, make it sound really nice and send it off to our potential funder.  

And then the last thing I’ll mention is we’re also attending to a lot of, I guess, kind of internal administrative things at Vera right now because we’re in the midst of a lot of change right this second. Our president of 13 years is departing at the end of this week, actually, which is kind of shocking to consider. We knew about it for a while, and now all of a sudden it’s here as those things kind of go. And our new president joins us on Monday. So in addition to kind of figuring that step out, I’m also in the midst of merging together my area of work with another related body of work that focuses on accessing housing when you have a criminal conviction. And we’re in the process of developing our budgets for fiscal year ’27, which starts on July 1st. And so there’s a lot to keep track of right now. So that’s kind of a picture of how I’ve spent the last couple of weeks of my job. I’ll hand it over to Sam. 

STEIN: Thank you. Yeah, so as Jack said, I’m a housing policy analyst at the Community Service Society of New York, which is often abbreviated as CSS. It’s been known as a couple different names over the years. It’s been around in one form or another for about 180 years as a New York City-based anti-poverty organization. And it’s changed a lot over those years. These days, we do a couple kind of parallel things that we hope can maybe be more intersecting in the future, but for now are mostly not. One is direct benefit help. So helping low-income New Yorkers get access to all forms of public assistance. Our biggest work is in healthcare on that front, but also helping people get into educational debt repayment or debt forgiveness programs, helping people who have experience in the carceral system, clean their record and help them find employment and housing that way. Also help them fight against discrimination based on those records. All sorts of like person-to-person things and also training trainers all over the city. So we fund a network of very small grassroots groups all over the city, especially in among immigrant neighborhoods, doing this work. So also teaching people how to get people enrolled in all kinds of public systems and help them directly.  

But that’s not the work that I do. The other half of the work that CSS does is policy research and advocacy. Some of that is on those same fronts. So we do a ton of work on health care, supporting single-payer health care locally and nationally, trying to end medical debt. And other things, my work is on housing. So we do do direct eviction prevention work with tenants, but my work is on trying to change the laws to be more pro-tenant, trying to get the state to build more social housing, preserve more affordable housing, get people out of homeless shelters and into permanent housing. And so the work that I do is kind of to be a research support to grassroots movements that don’t necessarily have research staff. So there’s a ton of housing groups. Some of them are grassroots tenant unions that don’t have any employees. Some of them are small groups that have incorporated as nonprofits, and if they have any money to hire staff, they’re going to hire an organizer or two, as they should. If they can hire a third, it’s probably a lawyer. There’s very few groups that hire their own research staff. And so, but they all need research of various kinds. They need research to show that the things they’re trying to defend against real estate attacks work, like rent stabilization and the reforms to the law that the state legislature made in 2019. They need research to show that new ideas would work, would fix the things that are broken in our housing system, or at least address them to show that there’s popular support for those things across the state, because most of our housing laws are at the state level, not the city level. They need sort of validation, I guess, is the term that gets used.  

So like, me pretending to be unaffiliated with all these organizations and writing reports just saying that it would be a good idea that they then take to Albany and point to the legislatures and say, See, you know the Community Service Society. They think that this eviction prevention program would be a good idea. We do direct advocacy, so I am also a registered lobbyist because I meet with elected officials at the city and state level and encourage them to pass pass all kinds of pro-tenant anti-homelessness legislation. Sometimes I’ve drafted legislation with members of staff of elected officials. It’s exciting to see when those things actually make their way into law, hopefully without too many holes poked in them in the meantime. The work looks very different at different times of the year. So right now we’re in simultaneous city and state budget negotiations. And so a lot of my work is focused on bolstering the case for investments in public housing, in all forms of social housing, in homelessness prevention and rental assistance for people exiting shelters. All that stuff costs a lot of money, and the federal government is making it harder and harder for us to do any of those things. And so we’re fighting for more resources and to tax the rich to make it possible. So that’s the focus of my day-to-day work right now. One day, those budgets will be passed and settled. The state budget is about a month late now. And then we’ll move into non-budget legislative priorities, at both the city and state level, and it’s just sort of an annual cycle of when you do different things, but the work really never stops. 

DEVINE: You’re both engaged in really important work that’s helping some of the most marginalized and exploited people in the city and in the country and beyond. And it seems like both organizations are focused on helping people directly through providing aid or providing contact to the agencies that could help them. And in certain ways, both of you are continuing some of the work that you did at the Graduate Center by doing different styles of research or looking for funding in one way or another. Maybe it’s a different sort of search for funding than you engage in at the Graduate Center, but it’s happening still but then you’re also engaged in very different types of work. It seems in the sense that Sam you’re really engaged in the legislative process working with organizations like tenant unions and trying to empower them politically, so I think there’s a lot of crossover here, but also unique experiences. That’s really fascinating to hear. So what motivated you to start a career in shaping public policy? I’ll start with Sam this time. 

STEIN: Sure. I mean, when I was a PhD student at the Grad Center, I always had this sort of dual-track career plan. One track was become a full-time tenure-track professor, and another track was to do exactly the kind of public policy work that we’re talking about today. Honestly, it was circumstances that put me into the second camp rather than the first. And having to do with graduating, like I was the last in-person dissertation defense before everything shut down for COVID-19. Jobs that I had applied for were canceled, job searches were canceled, just wasn’t a job to be found. But there were still jobs in this kind of field. And so I made that pivot. But I also was immediately happy that I did because in my academic work, I was constantly interviewing formally and informally, people who do exactly the kind of work that I do right now or the people that I’m allied with in those tenant unions. And so it’s very satisfying to just be the person who knows the thing rather than to have to interview the person who knows the thing to then analyze it. And I still write a ton. I write for work a lot. I write research reports and all sorts of other things, op-eds, but I also continue to write long-form work that sort of takes the things that I’m learning and applies them in a bigger theoretical framework that I couldn’t have had without having the Grad Center experience before. 

DEVINE: Ruth, go ahead. 

DELANEY: Yeah, so how did I get into this career? Because I had it before I went to the Graduate Center. But so to take us way back, I grew up in a white suburb in Connecticut. And like a lot of people, I didn’t really question the mainstream narratives about crime and justice. You know, it was the ’90s and things like cops and Law and Order and the nightly news kind of dominated, you know, what I was seeing about understanding this part of the world. But then my first job out of college was at a foundation that funded criminal justice reform. I had actually studied English and music in my undergraduate career, and so all these issues were pretty new to me. But I had a great boss who encouraged me to learn as much as I could. We were sent stacks of reports by the groups that we funded, and I read lots and lots and lots of them. And it was really reading about the death penalty and how it’s administered that stuck with me, it still sticks with me. That, you know, especially, but really everything I read opened up my eyes to how different the reality was from the stories that I had absorbed growing up.  

And once I had realized what was actually happening in our prisons, I couldn’t look away from it. I realized that this is where I wanted to be spending my time. So I found my way to Vera a few years later. That was almost 15 years ago. And when I got here, I was actually lucky enough to overlap with Michael Jacobson, who was our director at the time and is now on the Graduate Center Faculty in Sociology and runs the Institute on State and Local Governance. So a few years into my role here, I decided that I was, I found, you know, that I was like, I wanted to be able to do more. I wanted to have a better command of the topics that I was engaging with at work. Also in the work that I do and Sam may feel similarly, it’s often called applied research is sometimes the term that you hear. It tends to be very divorced from any kind of theory. Theory is not helpful to pass legislation, but it is helpful from my view to understand what we’re talking about. So I decided I wanted to have a stronger grounding in the literature, more research skills. I wanted to be able to run my own research study. And all those things led me to an interest in completing a PhD. So I was thrilled to get to study at the Graduate Center in the sociology department. And having that theoretical grounding to interpret what I was seeing in my day-to-day job has absolutely shaped the kind of projects I pursue and the kinds of solutions that I recommend. and very much inform the exact work that we’re proposing right now. 

DEVINE: You both seemingly already had an interest in public policy before you started at the Graduate Center. Sam, you’re talking about you, you were choosing between one in circumstances, the COVID-19, the reality of the academic job market pushed you in one direction. Ruth, you were already at the Vera Institute before you started your PhD experience. So I think it’s interesting how there’s kind of, people coming to the Grad Center already feel the desire to make change, and I think both of you are examples of that. And you both began to hit on this a little bit, but what did you research at the Graduate Center and how has it influenced your work after graduation? And I’ll start with Ruth here. 

DELANEY: Sure, yeah, like as I was just saying, the work I’m doing right now ties directly back to my dissertation. And I’ve kind of been like looking for the opening to do it for some time. So I’m really excited to have this opportunity. So I had this great chance to have my dissertation chaired by Michael Jacobson, which was a great connection because he had this experience of doing kind of like applied research or policy change. So he really kind of understood where I was coming from. And I had great support also from Tom DiGloma and Paul Atwell in the sociology department. I did a qualitative study of the experiences of people who had gone to college while they were in prison in New York State, and I wanted to know what the experience meant to them. That was kind of my question. What they told me actually took me to Bourdieu and the ways in which people accumulate and use social, economic, cultural, and symbolic capital, as well as how they see themselves from a class perspective. So we worked for a long time at Vera to get college to be more available in prison nationwide. And college is a very important kind of symbol of belonging to a certain class. It opens up different kinds of economic opportunities. And it’s kind of like in our kind of classless American society, it’s one of our most important signals that tells folks kind of where we sit in this hierarchy. In thinking about like, great, now we have college available, is anybody actually able to use that capital to do the things that they wanna do is kind of the next question that we’re looking to both examine and then propose some solutions to. And this came directly from my participants.  

When I was doing the study, I was pretty engaged kind of in the national dialogue around like, What does college in prison mean? And there’s like a lot of discussion about like, personal transformation and particularly for students of color who get access to like, often like a first sociology class is something that they find to be totally transformative as they’re kind of like residing in a prison and kind of learning about the structures of race and class that may have, you know, formed their path to get here. That story comes out. But then when I spoke with folks individually, what I heard was a lot more of That was there, but I also heard a lot more about like, Hey, I did this degree and I can’t get a job. No one is seeing that, that I’m different or that I belong in this world, and that feels wrong to me. And so like they felt really that the economic return was not coming to them, but also that kind of like this transition that they had gone through, this change in their view of themselves in the world was kind of like not being noted in their kind of place in society and how they were able to kind of like claim the capital that they felt that they had built. They’re really having trouble starting careers. And so coming into this work, now we have the pathway to that through college access. It’s not everywhere. We haven’t gotten every single person in prison is not able to go to college, but it’s much, much better than it was. And now we want to go that next step with the students and say, great, you’ve done the education. Now how do we make sure that this conviction barrier or this conviction is not going to be a barrier to you and being able to seek the career that you’re interested in engaging in? So it ties right back to the things that I studied at the Graduate Center. 

DEVINE: Sam, go ahead. 

STEIN: Yeah, I mean, to address the first thing that you said, I did have a familiarity with this world of policy advocacy, and it kind of brought me to the Grad Center, and then it’s funny to then go from the Grad Center into it. A union organizer. And as at my first day on the job, we actually got a presentation from the executive director of the Community Service Society about a recent survey they have done of the very workforce that we were trying to organize. And so that was like in my consciousness already. I later went, studied urban planning, got a master’s, then was a tenant organizer and on the board of the organization that I worked for was a researcher at the Community Service Society who was also getting his PhD at the Graduate Center. And so, you know, these paths have been sort of laid out for me and they all lead in the same circle. So that once I got to the Grad Center, I was studying political economy of real estate in New York, history of housing struggles, things like that. But I learned a ton both from the coursework and the dissertation work that is useful. I mean, Ruth said before that like theory doesn’t exactly help us pass legislation or help us in the legislature. And it’s true that like using theory talk doesn’t often work in conversations with people who are like, you know, thinking about their reelection in a year. But it does make me help me understand like what they’re thinking and what they need in order to do what I need them to do. And so it is totally useful anyway, even if it’s not like the language that I continue to speak in my everyday work. 

DELANEY: I totally agree with that. 

DEVINE: In a way, both of you were doing research that was somewhat critical or trying to understand why the initiatives or the organizations that you were working with in the past before you ended up at the Graduate Center and the networks that you built weren’t delivering on the results, whether that was the educational programs, they’re developing a better understanding of themselves, the sort of structural reality that led them into these circumstances, into prison, but the college education is not paying off, they’re not getting the jobs that they want. So when you go back or you continue your career, you come with a new perspective that lets you think in a different way, that’s really, Fascinating. So what other aspects of your time at the Graduate Center proved useful in the way that you operate on the job? And I’ll go to Sam here first. 

STEIN: Building up an understanding of the ecosystem that I now work in from a little bit of a distance was very helpful. So I had my previous job experience, but then when I was doing dissertation research, I was interviewing a lot of people who are now my colleagues in various ways. And so there’s a pre-existing understanding of where we’re all coming from that allows us to sort of start on third base instead of starting from building trust in the first place. I talked a little bit about how the theory was helpful, remains helpful. And just to give a concrete example where I was actually learning from a person who was a Grad Center PhD when I was a tenant organizer, and I said that there was somebody on the board of my organization who was political science PhD candidate. This was Tom Waters, who sadly passed away from COVID very early in the pandemic, never fully completed his dissertation. But we were in a particularly rough patch in the organization with things not going well, just not winning. And he sat us down for like an hour at the conference table in the middle of our office and gave us a like political theory lesson about why the speaker of the assembly held as much power as he did and why he was unwilling to do what we were willing to do. And that was weirdly, hugely empowering for me because instead of it being the sort of usual organizer boosting that we get from the kind of professional organizing communications people who basically say like, The catchphrase is, when we fight, we win. And I was starting to hear that as a criticism rather than an encouragement, like Am I not fighting hard enough? Am I not doing what I’m supposed to do? Is that the problem here? And this was a person telling me, like, no, there’s a reason we haven’t won these things and we’ve been fighting for them for 100 years. And we’re going to keep fighting for them and we’ll have to be creative and come up with new strategies, but it’s not you. And so I now try to… pay that forward and give the same kind of theory talk to frustrated organizers, whether they’re community members or professional organizers or whatever, to get them to understand the forces that we’re up against and not just see it as their own personal failing that we haven’t yet won universal rent control or refunding public housing or any of the things that are long-term goals. 

DELANEY: I love that. My reflection in this realm is a little bit less, I don’t know, exciting, I guess. Mine is that I worked part-time while I was studying full-time at the Graduate Center, and then I worked full-time and wrote my dissertation at the same time. So one of the things that was very useful, although very hard, is that I had to figure out how to manage all of these priorities simultaneously. The biggest thing I learned was how to figure out how long each kind of task that I would have to do would take me so that I could then look forward to the end of each semester and be like, okay, I’m going to need this amount of time. This is how long it takes me to write like a term paper, like the end, whatever research paper. So I need to look back and look at my calendar and figure out where am I going to find those hours? How do I do it? Which sounds very kind of like pedestrian, but at the same time, now I create a lot of grant budgets. And so one of the questions is, how much time for people’s staff do we need? Do we need 30% of this person’s time or 20% or 50% or 100% of this person’s time? And that then feeds up into the request that we make, which allows us to do our work. And having to do it for myself and think through how much time does this sort of activity take? And then coach someone through making those assumptions about themselves that we can be really accurate and plan to have the capacity that we need. has been very useful, although definitely not as much fun as having a theory conversation at work to get all fired up about what we’re doing. I’d like to do more of that, so I’m going to figure out how to adopt that into my day-to-day. 

DEVINE: Sam, I just want to say I’m so sorry for the loss of your friend. That’s a real tragedy. I think you’re each hitting on a kind of a different way that the Graduate Center really prepares you for kind of a career in advocacy and public policy. Sam, you really hit on the big picture stuff, how thinking about kind of the historical, social scientific context to what’s going on and kind of these relationships and these power struggles helps you kind of better understand why you’re not winning what you want to win and what you need to do, maybe to even move things, maybe not the full mile forward, but just an inch or a foot and make that progress in any way that you can. Well, Ruth, you’re really hitting on the dynamic of just project management, that when you’re at the Graduate Center and you’re working while you’re here, you’re juggling so many different things, teaching, if you had another job, like I do, or there’s a variety of things that you have to put into balance with your research, and so you kind of prepares you for that moving on in the future. After this next question, I want to open up to the attendees for their own questions. If anyone has any, you can throw it in the chat, or if you would like to speak up, please go ahead. I’m just going to do one question before that, and then I have some other questions prepared. If people do not want to ask their own questions, But let’s just move on to this next question. In what steps along your career path have landed you in the position that you have today? So we’ll start with Ruth. 

DELANEY: I talked about this a little bit earlier. I’ve just kind of, I had a serendipitous opportunity to kind of like learn about this field. And it just really caught me in a way that I realized, this is what I want to be spending all of my time doing. I had an opportunity to work in a couple different related areas. At first, I was kind of like, Well, maybe I just care about social justice, and so I worked in an anti-poverty nonprofit, and I worked in an international rule of law nonprofit, and I just didn’t have the same pull to get up and go to work every day. It was a job, and it was interesting, but it wasn’t like, I want to be there, talking to these people, doing this work, however much it takes. So it really was kind of like, realizing how important that first opportunity was to show me the path that I wanted to be on, and then to take whatever steps I could to try to continue on that path. I think some of the things that have been really helpful to me have been building relationships with the people that I work with. I think that’s a big part, with a place just as large as the Graduate Center, You know, you need to be, and everyone who’s kind of like working towards a dissertation, you’re trying to figure out who’s gonna be on your committee or kind of like trying to get to know people whose work style works for you or whose like intellectual approach is the right one for you. But like you kind of have to be out there like getting to know people and like in building your professional network in a way. And I think sometimes like, If you’re not going into, if you’re not thinking of going into like an academic career, it can feel like those are two separate things, but I think they’re the same skill or skill orientation, you know, whatever it might be that you want to call it, but just kind of like thinking about taking an interest in people, getting to know them, and then learning what they’re interested in and seeing how that kind of like pulls you to your next step in what you might be doing. 

STEIN: Yeah, I agree with everything Ruth just said. And I think there are ways that as a student, as a PhD candidate, you can also meet academics who are already engaged in the public policy field that you’re interested in. And those people will be important to you, whether you continue on as a professor or if you go to work for one of the organizations like CSS or Vera or any of the others, like I’m still in touch with those scholars who do important work on housing justice in New York on a regular basis. And it’s really nice to have those long-term connections that sort of link the two worlds and make them feel not so separate. My whole career path is like in and out between organizing and politics and academia. So I was a union organizer, then an urban planning student, then a tenant organizer, then a geography PhD candidate, now a housing researcher. So it’s always been that kind of intertwining, but the more you can do of that, I think, the better, and not to make them feel like walled-off worlds, because they’re not. 

DEVINE: What you both seem to be hitting on is networking, but in a way that’s not transactional, but is actually building lasting relationships, which makes sense in the public policy arena in particular, is you’re trying to build solidarity in a certain sense to get what you need passed, or kind of to build the power that you need to confront the sites in society that have so much kind of concentrated wealth and power that you’re fighting back against. We have a question in the chat that’s related to something that I want to ask, so we can just dive right into it. So the academic job market is tough. So are there any recommendations in finding jobs in policy? And then more specifically, how would you amend your CV or maybe crafting a resume to non-academic jobs and where to look for policy related jobs? So I’ll throw that to Sam first. 

STEIN: Sure. I mean, if you know It depends how narrow or how broad your interests are, I guess. If you know where you want to live and work, that’s one way to narrow it down. If you know the field you want to work in, that’s one way to narrow it down. If you know the exact organization you feel would be the best fit, that’s even the most narrowest way. And so it’s going to depend on what exactly you’re looking for and how much you know about what you’d be willing to do and what you want to do. So I guess doing a little bit of a self-audit first to figure out your parameters and then going from there. In my world of housing policy work, in addition to the general job boards that exist, like Idealist or Monster or whatever, there’s a number of listservs that have job posts included in them. Like the Furman Center for Real Estate at NYU, which is an institution that I’m generally not aligned with, includes a job posting section at the bottom of their biweekly e-mail. And so, you know, subscribing to something like that, probably I would see a job post there before I see it posted generally online. There’s an organization that It’s called ANHD, Association for Neighborhood Housing and Development. It’s like an umbrella organization for all the nonprofit housing developers in the city. They have a job board on their website. Again, it’s a little bit more specific than just the general everybody posts their job in the same place.  

In terms of amending the CV to non-academic jobs, when I was asked to apply to the job that I have right now, I sent in my academic CV and they told me how to redo it and send it in again. So I had publications first and then teaching experience and then skills, like research skills. And they were like, no, no, no, and job experience was below that. Because when you’re applying for an academic job, that’s sort of the priorities. And they told me to essentially turn that around, to have your job experience and your skills at the top. then your education, then your publications, and to seriously cut down. I had every publication, every media citation, every panel I’d ever been on, they didn’t care about any of that stuff. So cutting it down significantly, there’s like a, in academia, I was encouraged to put absolutely everything I ever did on my CV in the professional policy world, I don’t think that works. 

DELANEY: Yeah, I can jump in. I agree with that. I’d say another place that you can think about how to find where you might want to work is almost any topic that you want to work on. There’s going to be some kind of national conference of people who work on that thing. So if you want to work on corrections policy, there’s the American Correctional Association. If you care about probation and parole supervision, there’s the American Probation and Parole Association. There’s everything that you can think of. If you care about higher education policy at the state level, you can go to the State Higher Education Executive Offices Conference, which isn’t necessarily like you have to go to these places, because that’s quite expensive to go off and travel all these places, but if you can find their agendas online, look at who’s presenting, like look at who’s featured on different kinds of panels, like what kinds of organizations are talking about what sorts of topics. And that can be kind of a starting point to figure out the field, who works on it, and who you want to actually make contact with.  

And that’s going to kind of like take me to my next suggestion. But that can be like a way to get a lay of the land. There are Some ways to get into this sector, I’d say, there are fellowships and internships to keep your eye on if there’s not a job right away. I believe my experience, at least at Vera, has been that we’ve moved away from unpaid work opportunities entirely. So anything that is posted is going to be paid. Unfortunately, right now, the whole field of criminal justice policy reform is suffering because of the pullback of federal dollars from the DOJ last year, which supported quite a substantial number of organizations and efforts. And then there’s also been a drop in charitable giving. So we’re not currently in a growth period. But there are still ways to get in and to make a career for yourself. I think the biggest tip that I would give is like once you have that kind of list of organizations you’re interested in, just reach out. Me and my colleagues at Vera, like we get contacted by folks looking for advice for how to get into this field all the time. We get messages over LinkedIn, I get lots of messages over LinkedIn. It is a platform that works for meeting people. I don’t know that it works for getting people jobs, I kind of have heard that criticism a lot, But it does help you kind of like figure out who to talk to and make contact with them. We’re also kind of in a moment when organizations are being a little bit careful with what information they put publicly on their websites. So for example, like we previously at Vera had our names, bios, and e-mail addresses readily available, and those are down now. We’re not putting those up because of concerns about how that information might be used by some folks out in the world. But we’re all still kind of on LinkedIn. It’s like a mediator, so you can kind of get in touch with someone who’s harder to find through other means. And I will say we get cold emails as well, but just like everyone I know in this field takes time to respond to those sorts of messages. They’ll usually make time for a call even to talk with you.  

If you reach out and you just say, Hey, I’m super interested. How do I do this? You’ll probably get time with somebody on the phone, and that can really be the start of something. And then what happens next, if there’s a job opportunity at Vera and I’ve met with someone… I usually recommend, even if it’s not in my area, Hey, if you apply, let me know. And then what I do is I reach out to our human resources office and I just say, Hey, this person was really interested. They reached out to me. And that first contact coming from the candidate, indicating how invested they are in this, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you get the job or even you necessarily get an interview, but it does mean that somebody… pulls out your resume and looks at it, like looks, someone searches the database of all the resumes that were submitted and looks at yours and says, really carefully evaluates, is this something, is this a person who seems like the right fit?  

So coming back to that networking thing, there’s a piece to it that’s like, you want something out of this. You want to be able to get a job. But everybody knows that. That’s the terms of the conversation you’re having. But the conversation you get to have when it’s not an interview is more about, here’s what I’m interested in. Is this the kind of thing that your organization does? If not your organization, does somebody else do it? And learn from someone who’s engaged in that world about where else you might be able to look. And then the other thing is, I might not be hiring at Vera, but I might know what other organizations maybe just got a really big grant or have some kind of big campaign they’re launching, and I know they’re going to be staffing up. So I might be able to say, like, hey, look over in this place, or refer you to somebody else who’s like, hey, I’m not working on this topic, but I think this person over at the Urban Institute or something is like, I can introduce you. And that’s often just an e-mail that has you copied on it that says, hey, I met with Ruth, and she was really interested in X, and I think you were working on that. And now here’s another person in this place of organizations that you want to get a job who knows your name and might have a conversation with you if you ask them to. So I want to make like an extra, extra plug for doing that outreach because I so rarely hear from anyone who’s engaged in a public university. Like I get a lot of outreach, like cold calls from folks, like even undergrads, like coming from the Ivy League for sure. But other kind of like elite private institutions do not hesitate to reach out. And I almost never hear from folks at public universities. So I have like made it my personal mission to change that, so please do it. just e-mail somebody and say, I just want to talk to you, please. So there’s that.  

And then the second piece on like what to think about with your resume. It is typically more of a resume than a CV, as Sam said, and that usually means like two pages, which can be incredibly daunting when you’re used to counting out like everything that you’ve ever done. It’s very hard to sit down and like filter what matters the most. But it’s typically kind of like, at this stage, this far into your academics, you’re probably not putting your education at the top. It’s probably work experience and then kind of the education at the bottom, as well as any kind of like skills or important publications if you can fit them in there. But the big thing I would recommend is like, you want to do kind of like bullet points and add as much context as you can to what you’re saying and do that by quantifying what you did. So like, for example, I might put in like, I ran, you know, I worked on a national campaign to reinstate Pell grants. But like, if someone doesn’t know what that is or how hard that was to achieve, they might be like, oh, cool. I don’t know how to understand that information. And so if you can put it in as like, I managed, you know, contact to the field offices for five, you know, US senators, including Mitch McConnell, who was the Senate President at the time, and we did this many fly-in events, and we brought this many people. You need to be brief, but figuring out how to add some amount of information, and usually numbers jump out at people off a page. So I would say use numerals, even if your grammar is telling you to use a written out number, like shortcut your grammar and say, use that numeral so that it jumps out of the page. And anytime you can put dollars on something, that also tends to get people’s attention. So in your own graduate career, you could count up all of the funding that you’ve received and kind of include that in there. Be like, I funded myself through this. And you can count even if what you’re getting is kind of not paying tuition, that’s still an investment in you by the Graduate Center. So you can kind of think about that as a dollar amount. But that’s the big one that tends to be the thing because people are filtering through lots and lots of resumes. And so something that allows them to very quickly understand the scope of what you’re doing is going to go far in terms of being able to see your value as a candidate. 

DEVINE: You both really focus on the need to restructure your CV or your resume when you’re applying for public policy and advocacy jobs, because it’s totally different and there’s ways to reorder it, be specific about your achievements, but not go on and on and list everything that you’ve ever done. I think maybe in a fitting sense, Sam, that you’re a housing policy analyst, you emphasize location, location, location. You want to make sure you know where you’re applying to and not apply for jobs in an area that you do not want to live. And then this kind of continued focus on networking and outreach, go to websites, use LinkedIn, go to these various platforms, connect with people, try to build these relationships that could be for a job opportunity or could last down the line. So we’re running out of time here. We have less than 10 minutes left. So I just want to give both of you opportunity for a last question, a two-part question. What’s the biggest challenge that you faced on the job? And what’s one piece of advice that you would give to current graduate students looking for a career in public policy? And I’ll start with Ruth. 

DELANEY: Sure. So the work that I want to be doing around getting people jobs, businesses right now are struggling with the shifts on tariffs and international trade, again, in a way that’s, you know, we’re targeting manufacturing in the career project that we’re doing. And what we’re hearing again and again is that businesses are just not sure whether or how to invest in anything at the moment particularly in manufacturing. Are we going to continue with offshore style production or are we bringing things back into the United States? Nobody really knows. The cost of supplies keeps going up and down. So it’s just really tough for them to plan ahead, particularly when I want them to be thinking about a long-term strategy related to second-chance policy and hiring. And they’re thinking like, I don’t know how much steel is gonna cost tomorrow. I don’t know if I can make the screws I need to make that are gonna go into this wing of the plane. So it’s a bit of a tough time to be trying to get the attention of folks to do something that’s a bit beyond their day-to-day. But I’m hopeful. I’m always optimistic about how things can change at the state level. You do this work, and you meet people who are potentially so embedded in the agencies that they work in, and then can have such a huge impact on the things that they’re trying to do. People who can just say, I didn’t have a policy that allowed people to move from this prison to this prison to do this training program, but I think it’s a good idea, and I have the power to do it, so I’m going to change it today. And that sort of opportunity comes around all the time. So I’m excited to see more of that happen even during this difficult period. I’m sorry, I took up all the time for this. Please go ahead, Sam. I got on my soapbox. 

STEIN: No problem at all. My two answers to that question really quickly. The hardest thing is how terrible everything is, and having the knowledge that the systems we’re working in aren’t gonna fix themselves. And yet, working on it because we can make things better, but cognitive dissonance is pretty rough. The more practical thing is that when I was a PhD candidate, I was kind of encouraged to move away from quantitative methods. That wasn’t particularly valued in my department. And then you go out into a professional research world where if you can’t put a number on it, people don’t take you seriously. And if your numbers aren’t good, they really don’t take you seriously. And so I had to kind of return to my urban planning statistics classes and teach myself how to do certain things again. And I let that skill go in my PhD, so that was a challenge. 

DEVINE: So it seems clear that politics It always matters for everyone, but particularly if you’re working in advocacy and public policy, you can’t really escape it. I mean, none of us can, but especially not you guys. I just want to thank you both so much for joining us on this panel on making a difference. It was really great to hear from each of you. You both had really valuable insights and advice for our graduate students. So thank you again, and good luck with everything that you’re involved with. 

DELANEY: Yeah, thank you so much for this opportunity. This is a bit of a passion for me of talking about these other kinds of careers. So if anybody on the call ever wants to reach out and chat with me about this, I am available. 

STEIN: Yep, same. 

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