How I went to graduate school and selected my focus area - What about You? : Paula Claycomb

I have been wondering if any UNICEF of you have a similar story to this one, about how you decided to go to graduate school and study what you did. First, I should say why this issue even arose.

You see, my son offered an unusual gift for my 70th birthday, in September. He gave me a year’s subscription to Storyworth https://welcome.storyworth.com/about. It is a service that collects a year’s worth of weekly (or less frequent) stories that you write in response to their questions. At the end of a year, Storyworth pulls all your submissions together into a book, along with any photos or other attachments. You then have a nice little collection of stories on your own life.

A few weeks ago, the question was how I chose what to study in graduate school. But before getting to the specialization itself, I should explain how I arrived at the decision to go back to school for a Master’s degree.

I was working a gazillion hours a week at UNICEF’s New York headquarters and trying to be a decent mother and wife. I knew that having a Master’s degree would be good for my career and in getting to the field. The challenge was figuring out how to study, work and still have a minimal personal life. I checked out different programs in the NYC area and found a Saturday-based, three-year programme at NYU’s Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service.

I still hemmed and hawed for a few months, until a friend, who didn’t mince words, told me to quit agonizing over it. “The time is going to pass anyway, whether you are in school or not,” she said. “You might as well be studying and getting a degree.” And indeed, that is what I did!

I applied for the programme in Public Administration, focusing on public health policy, thinking that I would work on health policy issues in UNICEF. Policy is foundational for laws and regulations and for much public awareness and education. I enjoyed learning about the importance of inclusion and equity and environmental considerations in policy development. I also liked understanding more thoroughly the tremendous consequences of what policies say and require, and how countries wind up having such different health outcomes in their populations due to their overarching policies.

My thesis compared the health systems in Switzerland to those in two countries, an Asian one and an African one. I cannot remember which countries, I’m embarrassed to say. I used policy development and policy implementation as major indicators for overall well-being. I cannot locate a copy of that paper but remember receiving at least a certain amount of praise for addressing an unusual topic.

At any rate, I got through those three years of Saturday classes, with a lot of support from my husband, son and the powers-that-be in barely passing a couple statistics courses. When I received the Master of Public Administration in May 1994, at age 42, my husband and son were with me at Washington Square for the huge outdoor ceremony. James Earl Jones was the featured commencement speaker and he was magnificent. One sentence remained with me, and I recently Googled it to be sure of the wording: 

"It doesn’t matter what path we take, we have to remain curious and fearless."

The week after graduating, I was on my way to Nairobi to work in the Rwanda Emergency Office as part of a close-knit team trying to respond to the ongoing genocide in neighbouring Rwanda. From genocide in Rwanda to post-war Mozambique and then to Taliban-run Afghanistan (based in Islamabad), I worked more in external communications and media relations but also was exposed to, and fell in love with, social and behaviour change communication. SBCC (called C4D in UNICEF) is what I did on mission in East Timor following the violence of the elections in 1999 and later in Sudan during the Darfur genocide.

In the end, being the impatient sort, I wasn’t as smitten with the long process required to arrive at acceptable policies. So, I never worked in health policy per se, though was often involved in policy discussions through the work in SBCC. Later, I had the good fortune to lead UNICEF’s landmines and small arms team for a couple years, participating in the development of international protocols for small arms and light weapons, on the one hand and in an international convention on cluster munitions, on the other hand. I learned a lot about international negotiations in the disarmament sector and met hundreds of decent people, including defense officials from dozens of countries as well as very committed activists from civil society.

What’s funny is that supporting individual and group behaviour change, which is what I went on to specialize in for the many years, is no faster than policy development. There are few shortcuts to anything worthwhile, I guess.

What about you? Have you used your Master or PhD in the ways you thought you would in UNICEF or elsewhere? I know several colleagues also worked on their degrees while devoting slavish hours to UNICEF. Was it worth the effort? I would love to hear other experiences!