.png)
By Ava Sanchez, Bailey Meyers & Ken Chawkins
Every year, individuals seeking new opportunities for personal growth and advancement in their careers weigh their options: they can enter the workforce, pursue graduate school, or pursue a mysterious third option–leadership development programs. This third option provides the best of both worlds by offering participants on-the-job experience paired with carefully crafted programming to support their personal and professional development.
One such example is the Coro Fellowship in Public Affairs. The Coro Fellowship in Public Affairs is a “nine-month, full-time, graduate-level program that prepares recent college graduates for leadership in public affairs.” Coro Southern California is one of five Coro centers across the country, and it convenes a diverse group of leaders from across the country to study cross-sector collaboration in the Los Angeles public affairs landscape. In the following piece, three Coro Fellows on our team will reflect on their decision to pursue a leadership development program. Bailey Meyers, Coro Class of 2025 (Los Angeles), will discuss his hopes for the program before his experience begins; Ava Sanchez, Class of 2024 (Los Angeles), will reflect on her experience as a recent Coro graduate; and Ken Chawkins, Class of 89 (New York City), will share how Coro has impacted his trajectory as a Coro alumnus.
What led you to pursue the Coro Fellowship?
I was first introduced to the fellowship by Ken. At lunch in the office one day, he started talking about this program that we should all consider looking into. He seemed to truly believe in it, and spoke of his time going through the fellowship as tough but transformative. That seemed up my alley, so I looked it up later, and kept a tab open on my computer. I was drawn to the open-endedness of it, with placements across different sectors which would allow me to grow personally through diverse experience. And I was drawn to the idea of “intentional ambiguity” requiring fellows to think creatively on their feet. I’ve always been one to seek diversity of thought to create greater understanding, and the Coro Fellowship seemed like an ideal way to challenge myself to think about leadership and the role I can play in a democracy—pretty big ideas—in new ways.
What do you hope to gain through your fellowship experience?
Through the fellowship experience, I hope to gain a renewed understanding of politics and political processes. As a Global Studies major, I studied international politics, and I have worked on public affairs and advocacy campaigns for JCI, but I still feel like there are a lot of pieces missing. I hope that by interacting with various political processes from different angles, I will be able to have a more intimate and nuanced working knowledge of how our country works. I also hope to develop professionally and as a person. I know that Coro is a demanding program, and I look forward to seeing what types of things will really push me.
How do you hope your fellowship experience will impact your career aspirations?
I hope that the fellowship experience will influence the direction of my career. Hopefully, the fellowship will bring new information and experiences that will pique my interest, and this will inspire me to shift my career focus in one way or another.
What reflections from your experience/advice would you share with people who are interested in pursuing a leadership development program?
I think that this is tough, given the program has not yet started. But, my advice to anyone would be to consider what leadership means to you, what it can look like for others, and how it can be used. I think that someone considering leadership should be comfortable with moral debate. Practically, learn what the program is all about, and be proactive.
What led you to pursue the Coro Fellowship?
Coro was a new avenue for exploration. I had initially been drawn to USC for my undergraduate degree because it promised intersectional learning and academic exploration. As my time there came to an end, I knew I wanted to continue that exploratory learning in a more empirical way. I had work experience as an intern on Capitol Hill and as the LA County Democratic Party Fellow, but I felt I’d only experienced policy work in an explicitly political context. I wanted to observe how non-elected actors both impacted and were impacted by policy. My supervisor at LACDP asked if I’d heard of Coro and encouraged me to apply–the rest is history!
How did your fellowship experience impact your career aspirations/approach to your career?
At the start of the program, I was questioning whether or not I wanted to go to law school. Coro challenged me to let go of what I thought I might want and open my mind to new paths, some of which I didn’t even know existed. Experimenting with different sectors and roles in Coro helped me to recognize that strategic communications and coalition building had been my favorite aspects of my previous roles, and that pushed me to join the team at JCI.
How has the fellowship shifted or changed your worldview, if at all?
The Coro Fellowship in Public Affairs encouraged me to constantly challenge my beliefs and taught me new frameworks to guide my information gathering and analysis. My decision making process is fundamentally different now, and I think the fellowship also bolstered my self trust and groundedness in high-pressure situations.
What surprised you about your experience in the Coro Fellowship?
My cohort contributed so much to my learning. Before the program, I was excited to have a unique shared experience with ten peers. Afterward, I realized that we were each an integral part of each others’ experiences: our unique opinions, skills, interests, needs, and aversions made for a one-of-a-kind fellowship year. I appreciate that every class of Coro Fellows in Public Affairs will share the same program-specific frameworks, but will have a unique set of additional skills based on what they learned from their cohort.
What reflections from your experience/advice would you share with people who are interested in pursuing a leadership development program?
Constantly seek and create opportunities to prove yourself wrong–programs like Coro are the perfect setting to take risks, test your beliefs, learn deeply, and stretch your thinking. I think that approaching my fellowship experience with this value hugely contributed to my growth in the program and allowed me to maximize my nine months in the program.
What led you to pursue the Coro Fellowship?
A mentor of mine at UCLA had been sending young people to Coro for years. He put it on my radar screen and encouraged me. Also, I was attracted to the non-traditional approach. I had been encouraged to attend Law School and just didn’t see myself spending 3 years at school that didn’t really interest me. Coro made sense.
How did your fellowship experience impact your career aspirations/approach to your career?
It gave me the intellectual framework to gather information aggressively before coming to conclusions. It had me asking what I really wanted before making career moves. It helped me become emotionally balanced in tumultuous situations through my career so as to not be thrown off by false promises or pathways that didn’t make sense for me.
How has the fellowship shifted or changed your worldview, if at all?
I am a radical moderate. I am always seeking to understand opposing views. My worldview is that the large majority of people within a particular cultural context would agree with a majority of issues. If asked the right questions with an open heart/mind, that commonality can reveal itself and allow people with diverse views on other items to move forward together.
What surprised you about your experience in the Coro Fellowship?
Intensity of human interactions in close quarters. I didn’t expect the political/philosophical underpinnings (John Dewey) of the program. It has moved me to become an extreme democrat with an aggressively protective streak regarding the democratic system of self-governance.
What reflections from your experience/advice would you share with people who are interested in pursuing a leadership development program?
If you are coming to Coro, come for the product…the training, the interactions, the group dynamics, the intellectual stimulation. Do NOT come for the by-product which is the network. People who approach Coro because they’ve heard that the network is so strong are missing the point. If you are lucky enough to get selected, spend your year aggressively partaking. Do not think of this as a job…it’s a calling and you should give every ounce you have to the process.
The Coro Fellowship exemplifies this often overlooked third category, highlighting the impact of leadership programs in fostering both personal and professional growth, while equipping individuals with the skills to drive meaningful change.
Comments