As a part-time Master’s student and full-time Penn staff member, I’m on a slightly different timeline from most GSE students. I started taking classes in the Spring of 2018, and plan to be done this coming Summer 2020. It has flown by! I’ve loved my coursework. I’ve been consistently excited about my classes, and have really enjoyed feeling my own academic commitments clarify with time. I take...
Michaela Ward '20
Education, Culture, and Society M.S.Ed.
B.A. English and Pyschology Haverford CollegeI’m a part-time Master’s student in the Education, Culture, and Society program and a full-time Research Manager on campus for the Humanities and Human Flourishing Project in the Positive Psychology Center. Before coming to Penn, I worked as a Haverford House Fellow at the Education Law Center-PA, and as the Day Program Director for EXPLO at Wellesley (an academic summer program). I’m interested in how power is distributed in decision-making about schooling, and am currently focusing on the democratic implications of philanthropic involvement in school choice policy. I have broader interests in competing notions of democratic values in education; how schooling does/n’t give opportunities for engaged citizenship; and community organizing in education activism. I graduated with a Bachelor of Arts from Haverford College in 2016, where I majored in English and Psychology.