Sarah Kipling is a second-year CIPA Fellow concentrating in social policy. She is currently completing her final semester at CIPA in Washington D.C. through the CIPA’s D.C. Externship Program. Sarah is interning in the Central Office of D.C. Public Schools and can be reached at sak285@cornell.edu.
Like many CIPAs before me, and I’m sure many more to come, I’ve found myself in our nation’s capital. It makes perfect sense for CIPA to offer a Washington D.C. Externship Semester, since so many of us make our way to the District sooner or later. It is common for externshippers to spend their last semester of CIPA here, and I am no exception. Though my final semester is in the fall rather than in the spring, the externship has served as a great transition from grad school back to “real” life.
Along with only four other students, I enrolled in CIPA in the spring semester of 2012. I had been living in Ithaca since the previous summer; after spending two years teaching fourth grade in Chicago with Teach For America, I moved to upstate New York with my now-fiancé, Henry McCaslin, who was just starting as a CIPA fellow. While I worked at a nonprofit in town, I contemplated my next career move. I knew I wanted to stay in education, but I wanted to have more of an impact than I’d had as a classroom teacher. Meanwhile, I met Henry’s professors, I went to CIPA events, I became close friends with so many great Fellows – in other words, I transitioned into the program’s social circle without actually enrolling academically to take advantage of any of the wide variety of education-related coursework available. It made sense to make it official.
As spring 2013 rolled around, I again contemplated my next move. Though I still had one semester to go, I felt like I was ready for the next step. I now knew that I wanted to work in education policy, but I still wasn’t sure how. Through my summer internship the previous year, I had experienced education policy at a state level as well as nonprofit advocacy work. I loved both of these experiences, but I felt like I needed to learn more about potential careers. Once again, CIPA provided me with the perfect opportunity: the Washington D.C. Externship Semester. At commencement in May 2013, I walked across the stage with my friends. Instead of a diploma, I received a friendly reminder of my remaining CIPA requirements, and I joined the exodus to D.C.
The externship has been the perfect transitional semester for me. I still feel like a Fellow, in that I get long-distance support and guidance from CIPA, as well as here from other externshippers. I meet regularly with my assigned CIPA mentor, who works in education policy on a federal level at the Government Accountability Office. I go to class at the Graduate School, where I am enrolled in Understanding Congress, taught by a former US House Representative. I attend Colloquium, I write papers, and I give presentations.
But I also feel like I have taken the next step in my career. Through my mentor, and through all the other CIPA alums in the area, I’ve been able to network with a wide variety of individuals in my field and to learn more about the education policy landscape here in D.C. I work full time at D.C. Public Schools as a Senior Associate with the Urban Education Leaders Internship Program (UELIP), where I am getting valuable experience in what policy work looks like on a local school district level. I am honing skills in a real-life context that I began developing in classrooms at Cornell – evaluation planning, data collection and analysis, memo writing, and more. And I am picking up new skills I hadn’t thought about during my time in Ithaca, including basic HTML and blogging. I couldn’t think of a better way to continue my personal and professional growth and to round out my amazing CIPA experience.