Middlebury Institute graduates discuss where they are working today, how the Institute helped them get there, and what advice they’d give to current and future MIIS students.
My name is Matthew Levie and I graduated with an MPA from the Middlebury Institute in 2018. My language of study was Russian. I interned with the Roza Otunbaeva Initiative in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, and the Mintz Group in San Francisco, California, and now I am a senior analyst at the U.S. Government Accountability Office in Oakland, California.
I found my job on USAJobs, the government employment website. I was actually looking for something different, but I had an alert set up and it flagged GAO. If you’re interested in government employment, put your résumé on USAJobs from day one and set up an alert for areas you might be interested in.
The Institute provided a lot of extra-academic experiences, which gave me a lot more to write on my résumé and say in an interview than “MPA” (see examples below). I took several classes that came in handy for this specific job, even though I had no idea at the time how useful they would be. For example: Beryl Levinger’s Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) class, because auditing is just another name for M&E; Guillermo Rivero’s nonprofit finance class and Canri Chan’s accounting class, because where the money goes really determines almost everything else; and Kent Glenzer, Lyuba Zarsky, and Jeff Dayton-Johnson’s seminar, where I had to work with a team to understand an issue I had never before thought about and come up with a meaningful proposal for action, because that’s what I do every day now.
The best piece of advice I have for current students is that your greatest resource at MIIS is your professors. Your success is their success. There are at least four professors without whom I’d never have gotten anywhere. My professors helped me 1) get an internship in Kyrgyzstan (Maha Baimyrzaeva), 2) get funding to do research in Russia for a month (Anna Vassilieva), 3) write and publish two papers (Tsuneo Akaha, may he rest in peace), and 4) connect me with a summer internship (Moyara Ruehsen).
| by Jason Warburg
The Government Accountability Office has named the Middlebury Institute a partner school, ensuring targeted outreach and recruiting of Institute students for internships that frequently result in job offers after graduation. The designation came about after extended collaboration with MIIS and Middlebury alumni employed at GAO.
MPA alumnus Adam Schreiber shares how he launched his career as a project manager with the New York City Department of Social Services.
| by Valentina Bianco Hormaechea
Nonproliferation and Terrorism Studies alumna Valentina Bianco Hormaechea describes how an internship with the United Nations led to a permanent professional position.
