MSSP Program: One of the Best Decisions I've Made

 By Lindsay Lawer Shea, MSSP 2008

 

When I started the MSSP program in fall of 2006, I was unsure of where my education and my career were headed. I had 2 years of experience in research in the field of psychology, but I was really interested in the big picture or the “10,000 foot view” as I had heard it often described. I was really fascinated by how systems worked and who determined how they worked, but I wasn’t sure how to acquire the skills I needed to work this fascination into a career. I found myself volleying between law school applications and a research career, and given the wide range of interests and foci of the MSSP program faculty, the MSSP program was the perfect place to start.

Soon after I started the MSSP program, I found myself learning the answers to the questions I had started out asking. The good news was that each answer led to more questions. In the MSSP program, it wasn’t just about learning how programs operate or how they started, although these were critical program issues covered. The MSSP program was more about gaining the skills under strong faculty leadership to pursue a range of broad-based and specifically targeted policy solutions to help improve the world. In tandem with learning in depth about the plethora of social programs in the US and throughout the world, I found myself debating and being challenged to think outside the box about programs like Medicaid/Medicare, SSI and TANF. I discovered that there was a lot more to these programs than I ever expected and that these programs play an important role in weaving the social fiber of our country.

I was lucky enough to work full time while completing my MSSP degree part-time and I found this experience incredibly enriching. I would often return from a class and find myself in a meeting or generating ideas at work that I had been exposed to in the MSSP program. The application of the MSSP program curriculum into the real world was immediate for me and I found it very rewarding.  

 As I’m now completing my doctoral degree in health policy and managing a new public health institute focused on autism spectrum disorders, I’ve found that I dually use the information and the critical thinking skills I learned and practiced in the MSSP program on a daily basis. The big picture understanding of social policy has applied itself to my work in mental health policy unequivocally and in more instances than I can count.  Likewise, my command of the small details of these policies that I gained in the MSSP program helps me drill down on issues in innovative ways.

Choosing the MSSP program was one of the best decisions I’ve made. I still find myself going back to the books we read and notes I took both for my doctoral studies and in my professional life. I’m convinced that no other program could have so aptly and thoroughly prepared me to continue to pursue my goals. 

 

(Lindsay Lawer Shea, MSSP’08, is a Senior Manager at the Drexel Autism Public Health Institute, the first public health science autism institute in the nation. Lawer also serves as the Project Director for the Eastern Region Pennsylvania Autism Services, Education, Resources and Training (ASERT) Collaborative and is completing her doctoral degree in health policy at Drexel University. Her dissertation focuses on using national Medicaid claims to examine eligibility changes and service utilization among adolescents with autism as they age into adulthood and will be completed in 2013.)