Sharon Kioko (MPA '04 and Ph.D. '08)
MPA, 2004 and Ph.D., Public Affairs, 2008Bloomington, Indiana is a long way from Nairobi, Kenya. Sharon Kioko was both excited and anxious as she prepared to leave her job as an accountant at the World Agroforestry Center to start a master’s program at IU SPEA. She knew she was choosing the right school to kick-start her career in public finance – she’d done the research to find the top-ranked program – but she didn’t know how she would adjust to an environment so different from her homeland.
“I didn’t know if I would be able to fit in,” she recalls. “I had reservations about how well and how fast I would be able to adapt.”
As soon as she arrived at SPEA, though, all that anxiety melted away. Her cohort of fellow graduate students provided an instant community that embraced and supported her on her academic journey. “I developed such a good network of friends,” she says. “Once I was here, I was never lost or alone.”
Kioko’s leap of faith paid off beyond the master’s program. After receiving Outstanding Student Achievement Awards both years of her master’s, she applied and was accepted to the PhD program at the school, receiving funding for tuition and a stipend. Coming from a developing country, Kioko says she wouldn’t otherwise have had the opportunity to continue her studies at IU and fulfill her dream of becoming a researcher.
Her sponsorship carried with it many responsibilities. In addition to taking classes and teaching in the undergraduate program, she worked with Craig Johnson and Maureen Pirog on a number of research projects. “Between the two of them, they kept me quite busy,” she laughs. “It was a great learning experience - they were fantastic mentors that were supportive of my learning process. The work that I did, I did because I was eager to learn.”
Kioko’s research focused on state-level fiscal institutions – specifically state-level spending limits. She discovered that in most cases, there was no enforcement mechanism for state spending limits. In fact, most states don’t have a formal reporting process that could make taxpayers aware of actual spending with respect to pre-determined spending limits. Worse yet, those that do have spending limits in place have shifted their current spending off-budget through the use of long term debt. In her more recent work, Kioko has found that county governments with these spending limits are increasingly relying on these long-term obligations to meet current service demands.
Upon her graduation in 2008, Kioko accepted an appointment as an assistant professor of Public Administration at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University, where she is also a Senior Research Associate at the Center for Policy Research. Although she admits she “would have preferred a warmer location,” she’s delighted to have found what she calls “a really good fit.”
Her training at SPEA, she says, prepared her well by allowing her to gain a great deal of insight into her specific area of interest. “One thing I really enjoyed about SPEA is the fact that you can actually specialize,” she says. “The diversity of faculty and course offerings helps you hone in on your interests. I was able to start my career with a lot of knowledge about my subject area, so I was well prepared for an academic career.”