Incoming Student Profile: Kyra Sturgill, Class of 2020

Kyra Sturgill has come home.

A Hyde Park native, Kyra attended high school at the University of Chicago Lab School and enjoyed all the advantages of growing up in this diverse and intellectually rich community.

And yet, after high school, she longed to expand her horizons, meet new people and fulfill her ambition to explore new parts of the world.  

She began her journey at Colby College in Maine, later transferring to Tufts University in Boston. Majoring in French and English, Kyra had the good fortune to study comparative literature at the Université Paris III – La Sorbonne Nouvelle during her junior year.

“Traveling to Paris allowed me to achieve two goals: to learn more about French literature, a subject I love, and to become fluent in a foreign language. It also made me appreciate how much I enjoyed exchanging different ideas and sharing new experiences with others, learning from them as, I hope, they learned from me.”

After earning her BA at Tufts, Kyra moved to New York and explored a number of different career options in publishing and in the nonprofit sector. She began working for the education nonprofit 826NYC, first as an intern, and eventually conducting community outreach as an AmeriCorps VISTA.

“At the time, I knew I wanted to attend graduate school, but I was unsure what I wanted to study. I was considering going to school for a master’s degree in education, but it wasn’t until last year that I decided to pursue a Master of Public Policy. I realized that while I loved working directly with students, I wanted to have more impact on the system as a whole. To do that I needed to learn how education programs affect students’ overall success, and I also had to understand the methods used to evaluate these programs.”

Although Kyra knew that she wanted to return to Chicago eventually, she didn’t consider returning to attend the University of Chicago until she became interested in the MPP program at Harris.

“When I started thinking about what I wanted out of grad school, I realized that Harris met a lot of my criteria. First, it emphasized quantitative skills and ensured that students learned them through their core curriculum. Second, Harris is at the forefront of incorporating data analytics into public policy. Finally, attending Harris offered an opportunity that would be impossible anywhere else—to study local policy and work with organizations and city agencies in my own hometown.”

Once again part of the Hyde Park community, Kyra is looking forward to her future.             

“Working in New York, especially when I was conducting community outreach for a nonprofit, I became interested in the ways that communities and neighborhoods work together to solve local problems. I thought about this increasingly as I was considering graduate school and began to understand what a rewarding experience it would be to apply this interest in working with communities in Chicago.”

“In Chicago, as in many of today’s cities, there are layers of complex issues that citizens must grapple with including segregation, crime, poverty, educational inequities, gentrification. My hope is that I can apply what I’m learning in class to contribute to solutions that will help create a more equitable and even greater Chicago.”