Student Profile: Wendy Wang, MPP Class of 2026

“I'm originally from Beijing, China,” said Wendy Wang, MPP Class of 2026, “and one of the reasons I came to Harris is because I missed living in a city. My undergrad was at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts—a fairly small liberal arts college—and while I enjoyed the environment and experience, I did come to miss the energy of the big city.”  

However, Wang said it was the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy’s Master of Public Policy (MPP) program that was the main appeal in coming to Chicago. “When I was comparing programs, Harris had a stronger focus on quantitative elements. I had double majored in economics and international relations at Mount Holyoke, and I wanted to gain more technical, quantitative skills.” 

Wang said the academic, professional, and extracurricular opportunities at Harris have been vast and rewarding.  

“In my first year, I joined Harris Community Action, a Harris Student Organization that connects Harris students with nonprofits in the community and provides an opportunity for us to practice the skills we learned at Harris. We worked with Pride in the Pews, a nonprofit supporting LGBTQ minority teens in public school systems, and helped them develop a scoring system to assess their expansion plan.”  

The summer after her first year, Wang interned at DIANins global, an insurance company focusing on medical insurance solutions for international students in the U.S.  “The internship was a great opportunity to use skills I learned at Harris, including SQL and R. I built a revenue and retention analysis for client portfolios, and, since I had taken classes at Harris in corporate finance and applied financial management, I was able to perform an expense ratio analysis and help them analyze renewal patterns.” 

In her second year, Wang continued to transfer her academic experience to the workforce by participating in Policy Labs.  

“My team ended up working for an NGO called welcome.us that helps sponsor and prepare immigrants for a citizenship pathway. Our goal was to conduct a cost-benefit analysis to understand how much the community sponsorships program can save on a per-person basis, so my team built some regression models to create that analysis. Welcome.us said they were pleased with our findings and would be eager to work with more Harris students  through Policy Labs, which was great to hear.”   

Policy Labs, Wang added, was another great opportunity to use the skills she was learning as a student and apply them to an issue facing a client.  

Finally, Wang said the Career Development Office (CDO) has been instrumental in her career planning.  “[Senior Associate Director of Career Development] Alejandro Monroy Velez really helped me polish my resume. For example, I had originally presented my skills in list form, but Alejandro showed me that by adding content about how my skills benefitted my employers, I would provide context and send a clear signal to future employers about my engagement.”

Wang added that the Harris Mentor Program was also a valuable CDO program. “Through the program, I was connected with Harris alum Jennifer Tescher, Founder and CEO of the Financial Health Network. Through several online and in-person conversations, she became an important mentor to me, offering thoughtful guidance on my career direction and helping me refine my resume to better reflect my interests in energy and sustainable finance. She also generously connected me with professionals working in energy finance, which gave me valuable exposure to different roles and career paths within the industry. Those conversations helped me better understand how policy, data analysis, and finance intersect in practice, and they strengthened my confidence as I navigated career decisions." 

When circling back to whether Chicago had fulfilled her desire to get back to a big city, Wang said, “Chicago is great. I really like swimming at Promontory Point with friends and running along the lake in summer. I even participated in the Dim Sum 5k and won second place in my age group. There’s really always something to do in Chicago—plus there are so many different cultures and different foods. I can definitely see working here after graduation.”