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| SPS Speaker Ms. Lisa Mascolo |
After an enjoyable break over the weekend, the St. Albans School of Public Service class of 2012 was hard at work again come Monday. We started out the morning hearing from a speaker, Ms. Lisa Mascolo, currently the CEO of Optimos, an IT strategy company. Part of the mission of SPS is to showcase the wide array of public service opportunities to our students, and Ms. Mascolo shared her experiences as a consultant for the Health and Public Service group of Accenture. During her government-based consulting career, Ms. Mascolo worked with U.S. and foreign governmental entities looking to bring in outside vision and ideas to address problems and inefficiencies in government services. Ms. Mascolo also spoke of her involvement in supporting a number of non-profits (and of the role of non-profits in the public service spectrum):
Room to Read, which focuses on increasing educational opportunities for children in Asia and Africa through the building of schools and libraries;
Teach for America, which Ms. Mascolo noted was the number one employer of graduating college students last year; and
Dress for Success, an organization which promotes the economic independence of disadvantaged women through career counseling, skills creation, and providing them with professional attire when they enter the workforce.
Later in the day, SPS split back into smaller classroom groups for the economics mini-course, with Mr. Eagles, and for a discussion on the increasing U.S. reliance on remote-controlled drones in the war against terrorism. In the economics mini-course, after three sessions on the basics, today's session is the first of three focusing on more specific policy applications (today's discussion centered on the role of the Federal Reserve). In preparation for the discussion of drone warfare, the SPSers read a Jane Mayer article called "The Predator War" (
click HERE for a link to the online version of that article) and a
New York Times article focusing on those aspects of the Obama administration's decision-making process for use of drones that are now public (
click HERE for the New York Times article).
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| Mr. Eagles in his economics seminar (to Mr. Eagles' left: Kimberly W.) |
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| Mr. Eagles making a point in the economics seminar (to Mr. Eagles' right: Kameron and Jahan) |
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| SPS faculty member John Campbell leads a discussion on drone warfare (students from left: Luke, Liam, and Kinza) |
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| Thomas P. (center) makes his point during the discussion (from left: Olivia, Thomas P., Daniel) |
