Olivia Soolman

I Learned: This internship has helped me think more deeply about issues on a smaller scale. Often in classes, we focus on broader topics and areas of research and have to move more quickly from subject to subject. This internship has allowed me to dive into a specific issue and location -- in my case, water quality and maternal health in Massachusetts -- and think more about how broader national and international issues and research can be used to create solutions that help clients of RCAP and others in their service region.

How My Classes Helped: This internship involves a lot of reading and analyzing research to determine the scope of an issue and possible solutions, which is what I have done in most of my policy classes at UMass so far. Having already written policy papers for Controversies in Public Policy and Public Policy, I felt very prepared to thoroughly research a policy topic and write a white paper for my internship.