The Network Works

Jonathan Lane MPA 2018

Thousands of alumni support the education of students like Jonathan Lane MPA 2018, who also received his MBA in 2018 from MIT’s Sloan School of Management. Contributions to the HKS Fund helped the Texas native transition from fieldwork with the Peace Corps in Latin America to economic development in New York City.

“[T]hrough MPA program-specific funding, I had opportunities to network with classmates from different years and cohorts, which resulted in a summer internship and my current job.”

Q: Why did you come to HKS?

A: The MPA/MBA concurrent degree program was an opportunity for me to customize my coursework around my specific interests and pursue two complementary tracks: on one hand, to better understand a range of topics for which city leadership is tasked with making daily decisions—transportation, infrastructure, violence and criminal justice, education, and health care among them; and on the other, to build a set of skills, including adaptive leadership, effective campaign management, and negotiations, that would allow me to effectively manage organizations and stakeholders.

Q; How did you benefit from the generosity of alumni and friends of HKS?

A: First, through named and endowed professorships (including Tony Gomez-Ibañez, the Derek C. Bok Professor of Urban Planning and Policy), I had open-door access to thought leaders and technical insights key to advancing municipal economic development. Second, through HKS’s commitment to academic journals, I was able to promote LGBTQ advocacy and scholarship as well as my own leadership acumen as co-editor in chief of the LGBTQ Policy Journal. Finally, through MPA program-specific funding, I had opportunities to network with classmates from different years and cohorts, which resulted in a summer internship and my current job.

Q: How did HKS prepare you for your current role at the New York City Economic Development Corporation?

A: My work marries my passion for living close to the impact I hope to generate with rigorous decision-making policy frameworks learned in Akash Deep’s course on project finance and public-private partnerships, Shelby Chodos’s course on state and local financial policy, and Hugh O’Doherty’s course on adaptive leadership.

Q: What does being a leader mean to you?

A: To me, leadership is about moving others to action. It’s a way of skillfully considering and curating the environment in which change takes place, leveraging the motivations of its actors, and getting the group, organization, or society to realign its resources or priorities with root causes rather than temporary fixes.