A Day in the Life: Kristen Sueing ’25
We followed Kristen Sueing, a student in the Master’s in Public Education program, as she traveled to New Haven for a residence week packed with classes, shared meals, and storytelling. Photos by Tony Rinaldo except where noted.
Sunday, 7:00 p.m.
I’m from the South, so taking the train is really cool to me. It’s a straight shot on the Amtrak from my home in Washington, D.C., to New Haven, and I normally get into town on Sunday afternoon before a residency week. This time, our cohort met up early in New York. Kim Griffith invited us to her apartment for a brunch, and then we went to a New York Liberty game together. It was a great time!
Tuesday, 9:00 a.m.
We all stay at the Study Hotel during residency weeks. It feels a little like college, because all your friends are staying in one place. Every morning, a bus takes us to Evans Hall, where we grab some coffee and chat before class starts. I was talking to Conor Quinn, one of the math wizards in our cohort; Excel sheets are his language. Chris Moore is the class poet. Sometimes we read out our reflections at the end of the day, and no one wants to go after him.
We start the day with a leadership story. It’s basically an opportunity for every member of the cohort to tell their life story in whatever way they want. We all have polished leadership stories we tell at our jobs, but the closed-door nature of this tradition—no one is allowed to record or use devices—creates a really different feeling. Our cohort got pretty vulnerable with our life stories, and that resulted in some tight bonds very early in the program that have continued to strengthen over time.
9:30 a.m.
Professor Jim Baron teaches our class Human Capital Strategy. We learned a lot about how to use human resources to reinforce your mission, and how to tailor policies to create the type of work environment for the employees you want to attract. That includes performance evaluations, incentives and rewards, even disincentives or consequences. I work in hiring in the District of Columbia Public Schools system, so I was thinking a lot about how our hiring practices are drawing the kind of leaders we need into our buildings.
12:50 p.m.
At Evans Hall, they feed us lunch like we’re royalty. We’ve had paella, lamb chops, roasted chicken, salmon. I chatted with my classmate Jared Danker, who is a really smart researcher. One time, when a power outage made our professor late to class, Jared gave a spontaneous 30-minute lecture on program evaluation.
2:15 p.m.
For our afternoon class—Inequality, Systems, and Society, taught by Professor Jayanti Owens—we went into breakout rooms with our learning teams to work on a paper we’re writing. My team was exploring how to design policy to address challenges with their root causes in mind. This team is dynamic: my classmates Chris Neuhaus, David Miranda, and Vaneeda Murray all bring unique and diverse experiences to conversations about educational equity.
I’m excited to use this framework in my capstone project, for which I’m designing a leadership database that will help us more proactively predict when vacancies happen and who within our system we can be coaching up.
4:05 p.m.
In the second half of the class, Professor Owens brought in Laney Shaler, a Broad alum and senior leader at Denver Public Schools. She told us about a challenge in her district related to racial disparities in achievement, and we were tasked with coming up with a Shark Tank-style pitch of what we would do in her shoes. At the end, we all presented our ideas and got some feedback.
This class has been one of my favorites in the entire program. Professor Owens’s teaching style really resonates with me; she honors the integrity of every idea we share, and she’s so genuinely excited about her content. Her class also uses a lot of case studies, which really helps me think about these high-level concepts in practice.
6:00 p.m.
At the end of the day, Professor Stephanie Dunson leads a reflection colloquium. She usually poses some questions—often themed around big topics like belonging, community, or legacy—to get us thinking. Then we write for a given period of time without stopping. At the end, we share what we wrote with our classmates. It’s meant to engage a different part of our minds after a long day of classes.
