Alumni Profile: Andrew “A.J.” Calhoun, MPP’20

In high school, Andrew “A.J.” Calhoun, MPP’20, was inspired by afternoons spent at the YMCA where his father worked. “Seeing the programs every day after school changed the way I process the world around me,” he said.

For as long as he can remember, Calhoun said, his ultimate goal was to work on issues around social inequities in his hometown of Charlotte, North Carolina. Now, as Senior Manager of Data and Evaluation at Leading on Opportunity, an initiative of Foundation For The Carolinas—one of the nation’s largest community foundations—Calhoun studies issues related to economic mobility in the city.

“I manage relationships with community partners, develop research strategies, and translate those strategies into replicable analytic processes to reach objectives,” Calhoun said.

The hands-on, practical experience he gained from his classes, internships, and extracurricular activities at Harris, he said, have been integral to succeeding in his current role. “In the Spring 2019 quarter, I took three project-based classes, and we had real clients out in the world. Those classes allowed me to take my student work experiences and turn them into practical career skills.”

“In addition, my time with [Harris Student Organization] Harris Community Action and the Polsky Center was centered around partnership management, and being able to do that work within the context of Chicago was truly unique. It forced us to think carefully about policy design and contextualize issues with our partners. I’ve helped reinvent how we go about our work at Leading on Opportunity, and I think a lot of that has come from my learning about how to approach problems more holistically while at Harris.”

During summer 2019, Calhoun interned for the World Resources Institute (WRI) in the Ross Center for Sustainable Cities, where he developed a suite of inclusive climate action recommendations and planning tools for a coalition of 90+ mega-cities. The suite of recommendations was launched at the C40 World Mayors Summit in fall 2019.

When asked about the pathway to the internship, Calhoun said, “I applied online to a posting that was only available to UChicago students. Then, while on a career trek through D.C. with the Career Development team, I reached out to a hiring manager at WRI in person. It was a combination of my interest, and the opportunities provided by the Career Development Office, that facilitated this opportunity."

Calhoun said his current goals were spurred during a Fulbright scholarship with the U.S. embassy in Malaysia in 2016. “I created a rideshare program to transport students to and from after-school activities and helped organize the first-ever TEDx Event in a Malaysian public school. Working in Malaysia taught me about stakeholder relationships, troubleshooting problems, and finding both solutions and funding.”

Calhoun said it was his time in Malaysia that led him to realize changes in public policy should start close to home. “I recognized an opportunity to close socioeconomic gaps in both North and South Carolina, where I grew up and attended college, respectively. There are some very interesting questions around urban policy as the southeast rapidly urbanizes and suburbanizes.”

Calhoun decided Harris Public Policy was his best path to advance this goal. “As the place that practically invented urban sociology, Harris was the clear choice for me. There’s really no better place to study urban policy, and I would not have been able to take on my current role before going to Harris. The MPP helped me become fluent in the language of data and analysis.”