New Chapters, New Communities

In this blog, Finnegan Keilty, MPP Class of 2027, shares his experience with finding community at Harris.

When I tetrised my belongings into my car and moved to Chicago in August 2025 to start my master’s program, I assumed that a number of the hobbies I’d engaged in would not be feasible—either as a result of time and budget constraints or not finding people with whom to engage in these hobbies. Climbing was a particular concern because the flat, urban (and yet charming) expanse of Chicago seemed unlikely to harbor large climbing communities, and I assumed that would be even less likely in Hyde Park, because the University of Chicago campus, even with its size, doesn’t have a climbing wall.  

Despite my doubts, halfway through the fall term, I found myself riding the L-train downtown after classes one Thursday to climb with two classmates I’d met the week prior. On Mondays, I played volleyball on a graduate intramural team that formed after a friend gathered a group of policy students together. Before the term officially started, I camped and hiked for a weekend a few hours outside of Chicago, discovering a phenomenal taco and mezcal bar tucked between the parcels of cornfields outside Joliet, and cycled with peers along the Lakefront Trail, sharing a meal on one of the beaches along Lake Michigan while watching the sun set over the Loop skyline. 

I underestimated the community building potential of 11,000 University of Chicago graduate students and their immense pool of diverse interests, backgrounds, and experiences. In the square-mile-sized Hyde Park, where many students live, you see your peers and friends at bars and the grocery store. And on campus, graduate students have access to all events, speakers, and nearly all resources to support existing interests and help explore new ones.

One unique aspect of Harris I quickly came to appreciate was how the core helps shape community. Unlike many other policy or public administration programs I looked at while searching for graduate programs, the MPP program has a robust, two-quarter core sequence that all students complete synchronously. Taking the core with new peers sets a foundation for connection and community in a way I didn’t see reflected in other programs. As we first-years approach the end of the core, I hear many conversations about keeping in touch after the core ends, since we’ll filter into our policy areas of interest, potentially in buildings across campus. However, we’ll do so with the foundation and community we formed in the first two quarters.

Moving somewhere new is never without its challenges. Many of us have had to do this a few times: reinvent ourselves in a new city, re-form habits and routines, and create a community—sometimes entirely from scratch. But from my experience, UChicago and the broader Chicagoland area is a pretty good place to do so.