A Day in the Life of a Penn IUR Undergraduate Fellow: DC Trip Edition

As part of the Penn IUR Fellows in Urban Leadership program, the 2023 cohort participated in a day trip to Washington, D.C. to meet with and learn from policymakers and urban policy experts. We began the day at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement, which engages Penn’s students and partners with its faculty and global centers to convene world leaders, develop and advance smart policy, and strengthen the national debate for continued American global leadership in the 21st century. There we met with Daniel Richetti, deputy special representative for city and state diplomacy in the U.S. State Department. We learned that Ricchetti’s role consists primarily of aiding local governments in their work to bring the benefits of global affairs to the local level. 

At lunch, fellows chatted with D.C.-based Penn IUR alumni and former PhD students, including Sam Geldin, postdoctoral researcher focused on disaster risk; Chandan Deuskar, urban development specialist, The World Bank; and John Michael LaSalle, analyst, Climate Policy Initiative. Their experiences provided us with some insight on what life could look like after completing a PhD, and the way an urban policy background can apply to a variety of job opportunities.

After lunch, we visited the National League of Cities (NLC), located just a few blocks away from Penn Biden Center. There, we heard from Archana Sridhar, senior specialist in grassroots advocacy;  David Park, director of data and business analytics; and Bryan Griffith, director of member services and engagement. We learned about NLC's work advocating on behalf of cities diverse in size and geography to ensure cities are given adequate resources to be strengthened and supported by the federal government as they work to tend to their most pressing policy issues. We learned about NLC's events and programming, such as their Congressional City Conference and City Summit, which facilitates connections between local and federal leaders. 

We also heard from Madeleine Marr, legislative assistant to Senator John Fetterman, about what a “day in the life” looks like for those working on Capitol Hill. Spoiler alert: “There is no typical day,” according to Marr. Marr spoke about her experience in the fast-paced, demanding, but also rewarding atmosphere of working on the Hill, in which staffers are constantly learning to expect the unexpected. For example, while Marr did not exactly plan for it, her work under Fetterman has mostly consisted of responding to the recent derailment of a Norfolk Southern train carrying toxic chemicals at the Pennsylvania-Ohio border. 

For our final conversation of the day, we met with Tracy Loh and Tony Pipa, fellows at the Brookings Institution. We learned about their research endeavors regarding the future of sustainable cities as well as career advice. Both Loh and Pipa emphasized the importance of following our passions over more sterotypically “safe” opportunities that might come along. They also encouraged us to keep up with the connections we make along the way, as they might lead to future opportunities down the line, which proved to be true for both Pippa and Loh. 

We ended the evening with dinner at Bistro Bis, where we were joined by Penn IUR board members, Melanie Nussdorf, partner, Steptoe & Johnson, and Lawrence Parks, co-founder, Forethought Advisors, a financial advocacy and lobbying firm. Together, we discussed career paths in law, finance, and consulting, the future and importance of local journalism in its relation to urban environments across the country, as well as the kinds of cities we see ourselves hoping to live in after graduation. 

Although our train back to Philly was delayed two hours, our cohort of fellows made the best of the experience––strolling by the Capitol Building and even getting to see early blooming of D.C's famous cherry blossom trees before returning back to school.