Student Profile: Charlie Lowe, MPP Class of 2023

Having grown up in a very diverse community outside Raleigh, North Carolina, Charlie Lowe has always been interested in hearing others’ stories. “From the time I was a kid, I was obsessed with biographies and learning about other cultures,” Lowe said. This fascination with storytelling has driven his career.

After graduating from Georgetown University in 2016 with a BA in international politics, Lowe headed to Kosovo as a Peace Corps volunteer, where he spent two years living with a host family in Vushtrri. "While in Kosovo, I started Faces of Kosovo, an oral history program modeled off Faces of New York.  Several other Peace Corps volunteers and I realized we were meeting a lot of really interesting people whose stories would both inspire people back home and give them an authentic view into the lives of Kosovans," Lowe said. By the end of their service, they completed about 60 interviews, which they posted on Facebook and Instagram.

“One of the most compelling stories we shared was from a grade school director in a small village. During the war in the late 1990s, police took him into the schoolyard and beat him for teaching Albanian. By the end of the war the school had been burned down,” Lowe said. “So this director led classes outside. He had to chop wood to make money to fund the school. His perseverance is emblematic of what people of that generation had to do to survive.”

After his Peace Corps experience, Lowe worked for a government contracting company and then joined a healthcare startup. “That is when I thought about what interested me, what drove me, and where I wanted my career to go,” Lowe said. “That’s when I thought about going back to school. The MPP at Harris really appealed to me because it combined what I was looking for in terms of being strongly academic and helping me gain quantitative skills that I didn’t get in undergrad.”

Even before Lowe officially enrolled at Harris, his love of storytelling had led him to become the publisher for UC3P, the Harris student-led podcast. In the fall of 2021, Lowe became the club president. They now have six active podcasts, including a podcast that tells the stories of Chicago’s aldermen. “It has been an exciting process to restart the organization with all new faces and to see it blossom this year,” he said. “It has been awesome to see people’s ideas come to fruition.”

In addition to UC3P, Lowe has been involved with the Polsky Center, which consults for local businesses on the South and West Sides of Chicago. Along with a group of students from across the university, Lowe worked for a barbeque chain to help them think through and solve the problems they were facing. “It was a great way to get out of the Hyde Park bubble, which has been a goal of mine,” Lowe said. “And I hope to do it again.”

In summer 2022, Lowe was a management and budgeting consulting intern at Public Financial Management, Inc. After Harris, Lowe aspires to work in either public sector consulting or non-partisan polling. “Both would allow me to learn about peoples’ stories and share them in a way that is actionable,” Lowe said. “I am confident that Harris has the resources I need to succeed in the short and long run.”