The program is laid out such that we really provide that general management program and education so that students can take that any type of institution and be flexible in their careers with an emphasis through our concentrations, especially, for example, health care concentration, a lens specific to that space.

And so we augment the general management curriculum with that perspective around that vertical so that students can get that component of their education filled out as well. The MPA degree is definitely a very versatile degree. You can use it in

Nonprofit health care is a big one, of course, local city government. I myself am in the health care field. A lot of folks within the MPA program are not. They are in transportation, public works, emergency management, a host of different departments within the city.

So it's always nice to join the program and then you get to meet the different people across the city. And so while I say that I'm in the health care field, I'm actually in performance improvement. I truly believe that the University of San Francisco is the best program because you use real world experience.

It is not just about looking at case studies or reading theory, but everything you learn in the program is related back to what's going on in the world today, and that's what's real life. The school management sort of represents a wonderful container for us because ultimately everything is about managing.

Management is the art of allocating scarce resources and beyond that leading. And so in any organization, we're trying to drive change to drive momentum around any specific initiative. It's really all about management. The biggest lesson that I learned from USF and from going through the MPA program was that leadership looks 1,000,000 different ways, and so it doesn't always

mean that you're the executive director of a nonprofit organization or running a huge agency. You could be a leader in your own community. And so for me, a lot of my cohort members are leaders, they are leaders in their own ways and in their own communities, and they're leading really important work, whether that's educating the

community about the vaccination rollout, whether that's leading the actual sites where folks are getting vaccinated, they're creating change in the social sector. It's definitely opened up opportunities and conversations with leadership that I don't think would have necessarily happened if I didn't have a MPA degree with USF.

As a being a student at USF, you have opportunities that I don't think you have at many other universities to do internships throughout the city to get connected to influential people who are making policy decisions that at a high level.

I mean, our mayor in San Francisco is a graduate of the USF MPA program. And so I think that on just so many levels, there are opportunities there for networking, for connecting both at the level you are when you enter the program and then throughout your career, depending on the aspirations and the goals of the student.

The program really tries to set you up for success, and it does that by presenting you in the classroom setting with those problems that are faced by all those different levels of leadership, getting you to reflect on those different levels and the types of problems those different levels deal with from strategic, tactical, operational.

And again, that is the nature of the education that we would try to create within the program.