Eva Witesman (MPA '04 and Ph.D. '09)
MPA, 2004 and Ph.D., Public Affairs, 2009To say that Eva Witesman has a busy schedule would be a massive understatement. The recent SPEA graduate is an assistant professor at the Romney School of Public Management at Brigham Young University, where she’s involved in numerous research projects ranging from disaster response volunteerism to public service configurations. Her commitment to teaching, meanwhile, earned her a teacher of the year award last year from her students. She has two children and a third on the way, recently served as the Parent Community Council President for her eldest’s charter school, and loves to paint –one of her works was selected for display at a local art museum. She also describes herself as an “avid gardener.”
Such a rich lifestyle would be impossible were it not for what she learned at SPEA, Witesman says. By giving her opportunities in both teaching and research while she pursued her PhD, the program enabled her to learn time management and a high level of proficiency in all aspects of academia.
“I love that my SPEA education has given me the skills to have some freedom even during my first few years as an assistant professor,” she says. “This is usually a time when people are just trying to keep their heads above water, but my mentorship from SPEA has helped me do much more than that.”
Witesman first came to SPEA not long after finishing her bachelor’s degree in university studies at the University of Utah. She was working for a nonprofit software design company when she decided to pursue a master’s in public affairs.
“I looked back over my short life up to that point and realized the consistent theme running through it was public service,” she says. So she opened up U.S. News and World Report, saw that SPEA was ranked number one among public affairs programs, and “applied there and only there.”
IU was also a great fit because it enabled her husband to study Finnish, a language taught in only a handful of universities. As the couple prepared for the move to Indiana, however, Witesman learned she was pregnant. She spent much of her first year in the program feeling sick and sleepy, but still managed to distinguish herself academically. She graduated in the top ten percent of her class despite caring for a newborn.
On Witesman’s last day of classes for her MPA, one of her instructors presented her PhD research to the students. For Witesman, it was a revelation. “I lit up,” she recalls. “I realized I wanted to be a researcher.”
The family was headed to Finland for a year, so Witesman applied to the PhD program remotely. Soon she was back at IU, immersed in a range of research topics that included civil service training, the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, and disaster volunteerism in response to flooding in the Midwest. By her third year, she had amassed such an impressive portfolio that she was invited to apply to BYU although she hadn’t even begun her dissertation.
“In the course of three days I wrote a dissertation proposal, put a committee together, and went out to interview,” she says. “It was madness.”
Witesman clearly wowed the committee, who not only offered her the job but also gave her an extra semester to finish her dissertation before she began teaching. She gives credit to SPEA, however, for a well-deserved reputation that has a way of opening doors.
“All you have to say is, ‘I was educated in public administration at Indiana University,’ and search committees start salivating,” she says. “It’s not just me – I look at all my peers from SPEA and I can see how they’ve also succeeded. Those rankings are meaningful. It’s not just a number. It reflects the quality of the faculty and the education you receive.”