The Hidden Leverage Grad Students Have Over Their Tuition Bill
Financial aid for graduate students operates on different rules than it does for undergraduates. There is, essentially, no federal need-based aid available to grad students, aside from the kind you need to pay back. That means the only money to appeal for to lessen the sticker shock of your preferred graduate program is institutional aid — the scholarships, fellowships, tuition discounts, and assistantships that individual schools control and distribute at their own discretion. Unlike a federal Pell Grant common for undergraduates, these institutional awards are negotiable, because a human being at the university, not a government algorithm, decides how much...
The Art of Applying in the Age of AI
No matter where or when they served, most Returned Peace Corps Volunteers face the same simple question at the end of their service: what next? For many, graduate school is the natural next step, a way to transform the first-hand, on-the-ground knowledge they developed facilitating development projects into a fulfilling career. While all RPCVs honed those project management skills in-country, applying to graduate school can feel like managing several projects at once. Prospective students doing due diligence must compare programs, faculty expertise, tuition, funding opportunities, admission requirements and deadlines, all while creating an application that feels personal and authentic. Thankfully,...
Degrees of Freedom
While it may not be immediately obvious how to apply it, all Peace Corps Volunteers know that the experience they build managing community projects during their two years of service will be relevant in some way to whatever career path they choose. That said, that experience rarely translates into the traditional higher education model, which can be rigid in deciding how to evaluate the unique strengths of applicants to grad school programs. But a small number of schools take a different approach to what can be considered non-traditional experience, enabling students to design their own degrees and turn prior work...
Make it (Field) Work
Ask five people what grad school looked like as a complement to Peace Corps service, and you won’t hear much about seminars. Somewhere between the thesis and the practicum, a volunteer inevitably finds themselves barreling down a mountain on a bike with a dozen kids trailing behind — and realizing, mid-descent, with certainty that there’s no going back to who they were before. They might instead tell you about defending a class assignment over Zoom from inside a mosquito net during a 48-hour blackout, or taking the GRE in a Mongolian village at twenty degrees below freezing. A graduate degree...
On the Road to Kinale
To get to the town of Kinale — a small settlement of mud huts and brick-and-mortar blocks situated in the high country along the Western edge of the Great Rift Valley in Kenya, East Africa — one must negotiate four miles of evergreen-forested terrain, the distance between the Nairobi Highway and the village itself. This negotiation is abetted by an unnamed road connecting the two points, a dirt track that can, at least in the brief dry season, accommodate, along with the plentiful bicycles and ubiquitous humans on foot, actual cars, a rare mode of travel in this poor, rural...
The Longest Extra Time
Jill Tucker sat quietly in a bar, watching the World Cup match unfold on the TV with everyone else, when a man sitting nearby addressed her: “You were my teacher.” Tucker had served the Peace Corps in 1990, teaching English for two years in the Capital of Cape Verde, Praia. Thirty-five years later, Ivan, a student in her class, wound up at the very same bar that night, watching the World Cup, too. When Tucker finished her Peace Corps service in 1992, there was no video call or social media to keep her connected to her students or the friends...
Back to the Solomons
On September 6, Peace Corps Acting Director Christopher Landau and Solomon Islands Minister of Foreign Affairs and External Trade Rick Houenipwela signed a bilateral country agreement in Honiara to formally reestablish the Peace Corps program. The agreement renews a partnership that once brought more than 700 Volunteers to communities across the country and that has remained dormant since the program was suspended in 2000. The first new group of Volunteers is expected to arrive in early 2028, initially working in education. Peace Corps staff and the Solomon Islands government will spend the intervening period identifying communities where Volunteers can contribute...
Paper Flowers: What We Do With the Time We Are Given
Some lives are measured in years. Others are measured by what they leave behind. For Shalin Shah, a young Indian American whose Peace Corps journey was interrupted almost as soon as it began, time would become painfully limited. But Paper Flowers, a feature-length independent film inspired by his true story, is not primarily interested in how Shalin died. It asks audiences to consider something much more difficult - and ultimately more hopeful: How did he choose to live? After graduating from the University of Southern California, Shalin traveled to Peru in 2015 to begin training with the Peace Corps. Service...
Peace Corps to Politics
When President John F. Kennedy challenged Americans to serve communities around the world, he envisioned more than just two years of Volunteer service. He believed Peace Corps would shape generations of leaders committed to building stronger communities, both abroad and at home. Today, that vision continues to unfold as a growing number of Returned Peace Corps Volunteers (RPCVs) step into public office, carrying the lessons they learned overseas into city halls, state legislatures, school boards, and beyond. For many, running for office is not a career change; instead, it is the next chapter in a lifelong commitment to service. The...
The Next Peace Corps Mission: Peacebuilding in America
Americans watch in anguish as our nation sinks deeper into a crisis of politicized contempt and violence. As a people, we share far more common ground than is portrayed by the vitriol of many political leaders and media voices. So how can we reverse America's plunge into self-destructive division? Global experience shows that societies can heal enmity and violence when ordinary citizens join together to work across divides. Americans are already pursuing thousands of local projects to restore civility in public discourse and manage conflicts peacefully. But we must vastly expand this work of peacebuilding, and the nearly 250,000 Americans...