March 2026 Student Spotlight

Chance Utkin, MPA/MSCP Candidate

Tell us about your decision to get a dual MPA-MSCP degree. What led you there?
I had an interest in politics and public policy from a young age. Growing up, I remember watching the news and generally having a curiosity for how the government functioned. My father came here as a refugee from Ukraine in 1979, and my mom grew up in rural Louisiana. Both of them served in the military and the idea of laying down roots and staying in one place was rarely an option until I made it so in my mid 20s here in New York. Circumstances beyond my control made going to college at 18 difficult. I had two initial problems to solve coming into adulthood: Get and stay out of poverty and maintain a roof over my head my first career, which centered around Banking and Financial Services, started at 19 years old. I was walking around the town I lived in with a paper resume at a time where you could still apply to jobs in person. I got interviewed almost on the spot for a Teller position and was able to work my way up from there. Within a few years, I had become a Relationship Manager, with a focus on banking and mortgage products targeting mass-affluent consumers. I also worked with small businesses and gained work knowledge of the life cycle of a small business. Through this career, I got exposed to how banking regulations are enforced in the branches and quickly observed the inequities in the system. The bottom line is that I was more interested in the policies and the mechanics of what I was doing, rather than my job myself, and I decided to work toward realigning my work with my values and interests. Over many years, I worked toward establishing stable residency in a city that would allow me to go back to college.  At the same time, I slowly shifted my focus in my previous career toward operations and project-oriented work. I shifted from working at Banks to working at a Fintech Startup here in New York, and used that shift to establish residency here, leave Sales for good for Operations, and accelerate my attempts to get my college degree. During this process, I continued to have coffee chats with every single person in my network that had roles that I was interested in. I revisited my interests in politics and public policy from my youth and started brainstorming how I could translate that interest to an actual career.

After getting my associate’s degree online, I managed to get into Baruch College. At the same time, I experienced my second industry layoff in a two-year period and made the decision to take a leap of faith and focus entirely on my education. In 2023, I changed my major to Marxe’s Bachelor of Science in Public Affairs program and quickly knew I had found my calling and was on the right track. After some part-time internships and short-term stints in academia and the nonprofit space, and an apartment fire that nearly derailed my entire existence here in New York, I graduated with honors in 2024. It was at that point, I made the calculation based on the job market, that going straight to grad school was the right move. The MPA/MSCP program covered both my specific interests in city planning and public policy, and my future interests in people management and training. It felt like a fitting capstone to my decade long journey to go back to school and pursue my dreams. I started the MPA program in January of this year and got my job I have now within the Mayor’s Office of Operations around the same time. I would later decide to enroll in the dual-degree program once it was made available, having my first MSCP classes this semester.

How has your experience been in the program?
It has been both challenging and rewarding. I feel like every class is on subjects and material that I am genuinely excited to learn about, and that does make school a lot easier. But it is tough. I work full-time. I have a six-month-old son. I train to maintain a mostly full-time course-load. I try to serve the community where I live and support my wife with her own career and full-time grad school. I try to remind myself it’s okay to be human. There are going to be mistakes and missed deadlines sometimes. But I also learn by doing and I have slowly been able to work toward a work/school/family life balance that works enough to feed all areas of my life.

When it comes to the classes itself, I really like the way Marxe Professors try to engage the class with the material. With City Planning last semester, I enjoyed going on site visits, preparing for debates and engaging with my classmates. I got so used to papers and written assignments, that it has been a nice change of pace to have to go outside my comfort zone and fine-tune some presentation and design skills in the process. Overall, I like that the Professors I have interacted with are passionate about their work and enjoy teaching. Last semester, a final project for a class involved a six-page Infographic. To be frank, I am terrible at visual design, and I was absolutely terrified of this project. I would have much rather write a 10–15-page single-spaced research paper. I accepted, however, that was the precise reason I needed to do that project. So, I got it done. And it wasn’t a masterpiece. It was not comfortable. But I learned how to create a functional infographic in the process, a skill that I may in fact use at work in the coming months. That’s what I like about Marxe. I am constantly pushed to learn new ways of doing things, and in the process, I become a better student and a better worker.

Coming from undergrad, I appreciate that many of my classmates are either direct peers, working for the city, or in similar professional paths. It’s a helpful reminder that I am not alone, and we are all in this together.

Can you talk a bit about what you do as a Policy Analyst at the NYC Mayor’s Office of Operations?
I serve as a Policy Analyst within the Project Management team here. Our team supports the policy advisors and other stakeholders across the Mayor’s Office of Operations. Ops often serve as a supporting partner on mayoral initiatives that requires cross-agency cooperation. For example, our team does a lot of work with the city’s Vision Zero Task Force which is a cross-agency group of experts working across a variety of initiatives and efforts with a broad goal to reduce vehicle fatalities to zero. Some of my day-to-day duties include providing project support through maintaining project plans and timelines, providing meeting documentation, and supporting follow up tasks related to these projects and meetings. I also handle incoming and outgoing written and verbal communication with agencies with subject matter and frequency depending on the project. In some ways, our team serves as ultimate Generalists, with the ability to fill in the gaps wherever need. One small example of this is something that not everyone thinks about but is important for any professional workforce: Documentation. Right now, I am leading a project that involves compiling and editing dozens of separate documents into one polished training manual. The goal of a project like this is to ensure that anyone in city government, regardless of what their background is, can gain a basic understanding of what Vision Zero is, what we do and how we do it.  That is just one project I am working on, and my portfolio can change from month to month depending on what is going on.

Which policies have been the most challenging to analyze?
Coming from the private sector, the most challenging part of my job, and my career transition in general, has been understanding how policies are actually implemented in the real world. The reality is, whenever you see a press release of some new government policy or Initiative, there were probably dozens of people involved with getting that policy from the idea stage to implementation. And it’s rarely a straight path. Getting things done in government can often take coordination with several agencies, dozens of individuals, all with their separate schedules, workloads and agendas, and a lot of what feels like pushing uphill. This is not unlike my experience in the private sector. The difference now is that the projects that I work on impact on the constituents of the City of New York and have the potential to improve the lives of regular people. That drives me to be the best worker I can be, and to continue to think outside the box. If I don’t understand how something works, I throw myself into learning the why and the how of it. If I don’t understand a policy, I research it. If there’s a new technical system that I feel would be beneficial for my job, I learn it. In general, moving to the public sector, my philosophy has remained the same. I don’t believe in the “If it isn’t broken, don’t fix it” school of thought. But I do try to put myself into the shoes of the people who maintain and work the process I am interested in improving. It is the space between “Great Idea” and “Great Implementation” that I try to work to improve.