Fueling the future of transportation leadership

Posted on October 1, 2018 by Leslie Wells

Brian Ness standing in an atrium. — Brian Ness with the Idaho Transportation Department graduated from Executive Education’s National Transportation Leadership Institute in 2000 and now serves as an instructor for the program.

It’s been 18 years since Brian Ness first attended the National Transportation Leadership Institute. He was just starting a new position when his boss told him to pack his bags for two weeks; he was heading to Indianapolis.

“I felt there was no way I could spend two weeks away from work,” he says. “I was still trying to learn the job and get established in the community.”

Little did Ness know the long-term impact those 13 days would have on his now 40-year transportation career.

“It was a fantastic, life-changing experience,” he admits. “It was my first exposure to national-level training, which gave me a jumpstart on my career and helped me build a network of people I can rely on. Nearly two decades have passed but I still use many of the things I learned in that training to this day.”

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Coroner’s office internship offers different view on crime scenes

Posted on September 24, 2018 by Leslie Wells

O’Neill

“You work a lot more with live people than you do with dead people.”

That’s how Makayla Morris describes her internship with the Marion County Coroner’s Office. Morris spent the summer there and is now joining their ranks as a deputy coroner after she was offered a position before she even has her diploma in hand.

Morris came to IUPUI as a forensics major, but quickly realized living in a lab wasn’t what she wanted. That’s when she found O’Neill’s criminal justice degree.

“I liked that you got a lot of hands-on experience in O’Neill,” she says. “Criminal justice courses help you learn how to deal with people in real-life situations rather than just working with specimens in the lab.”

Morris switched majors, keeping forensics as her minor. It was in a forensics class that a deputy coroner came to speak to students about the job and the internship opportunities available to all students.

“Before that, I thought I wanted to work crime scenes,” she says. “Then I heard the deputy coroner describe what they do and knew that was what I had been looking for.”

So what does a deputy coroner do?

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Borst Fellowship opens doors to O’Neill grad students

Posted on September 17, 2018 by Leslie Wells

Alumnus Jordan Lett served as the Borst Fellow for the 2018 legislative session.

To apply for the Borst Fellowship for the upcoming legislative session, contact O’Neill Career Advisor Stacy Lozer at slozer@iupui.edu.

Jordan Lett became a Borst Fellow while pursuing his MPA at the O’Neill School. What began as a fellowship focused on fiscal impact led him directly into his current job for the state budget agency.

“This fellowship helped me secure a job and make connections for my career,” he says. “It provides an opportunity to really get your foot in the door and find out what areas of public policy or government truly interest you.”

Lett’s story is one Kathleen Hursh, former associate director of O’Neill Career Services, hears every year. Hursh headed up the Borst Fellowship recruiting process for the school during her time with O’Neill. She says the fellowship opens doors that extend well beyond the Statehouse.

“We have never had a Borst Fellow who hasn’t been funneled into a really great job,” Hursh says. “This is a pipeline into the political, private, and nonprofit sectors because students have a rare opportunity to be at the table with influential people discussing critically important topics.”

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Connecting the lessons of 9/11

Posted on September 11, 2018 by Leslie Wells

Many O’Neill students don’t remember when the twin towers fell. They don’t recall the brave passengers who took control of an airplane before it crashed it into a Pennsylvania field. Nor do they remember seeing the hole left in the Pentagon. After all, most of them were very young on September 11, 2001.

But O’Neill faculty do remember. They remember the attacks and the fallout. Their first-hand experiences allow them to serve as a bridge to the past for tomorrow’s public safety professionals.

O’Neill senior lecturer Bill Foley and retired clinical lecturer Jim White were both directly impacted by the events of 9/11. White was the deputy director of the Indiana Law Enforcement Academy at the time, as well as serving in the Indiana National Guard. Foley was a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army, supervising a training support brigade at Fort Harrison.

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Students can build employable skills with an intergroup dialogue certificate

Posted on September 10, 2018 by Leslie Wells

The hardest conversations to have are often the most important. Yet it’s vital to face conflict, communicate across differences, and work through difficult situations. To help students learn how to do that, and make them more employable in the process, O’Neill’s Tamra Wright and her Intergroup Dialogue colleagues have developed the intergroup dialogue certificate, IUPUI’s first undergraduate interdisciplinary certificate on campus.

What is intergroup dialogue?

As part of the university’s Welcoming Campus Initiative, representatives from four schools—O’Neill, the School of Engineering and Technology, the School of Liberal Arts, and the School of Social Work—teamed up with the Division of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, and the Office of Academic Affairs to create the Intergroup Dialogue (IGD). Its new certificate helps guide conversations between people of different backgrounds, including gender, race, socioeconomic status, cultural background, or any other characteristic that would differentiate one group from another.

Those skills are critical for O’Neill students, given the diverse fields many will enter after graduation. Wright, O’Neill’s director of diversity, equity, and inclusion, says the lessons learned throughout the program are invaluable to students’ professional success.

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