2018 MONUM Fellow

The Initiative on Cities is delighted to welcome Emily Rackleff as its Graduate Student Fellow for the City of Boston’s Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics this summer.

Emily Rackleff is a MBA and MS candidate in the Questrom School of Business, focusing on Social Impact and Digital Innovation respectively. She formerly served as the Senior Program Manager of Boston Cares, an AmeriCorps program for tutoring and mentoring. She has also worked at the National Policy Consensus Center and the Toulan School of Urban Studies and Planning at Portland State University.

What made you want to apply for the internship?

I’ve always been really interested in what the Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics is  doing. I have a passion for doing community engagement work and creating social impact, and I thought that the Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics and the Initiative on Cities has interesting and innovative ways of approaching the different challenges that Boston residents face. I also had the opportunity earlier this year to work with the Housing Innovation Lab through the Mod3 IBM Challenge. I had a first-hand opportunity to work on one of their projects and loved it. I’m super excited to continue that sort of work.

What are you most looking forward to this summer?

I’m excited to learn more about the projects that I’ll have. I’m really excited to be working with such a dynamic group in the Mayor’s office and to be a part of the work that the Initiative on Cities is doing. There are nine other fellows, so I’m looking forward to working with them, learning about their experience, and figuring out different ways that we can collaborate during the summer and hopefully in the future.

How does your business background tie in with government work?

This will be a great opportunity to leverage some of the skills that I’ve built over the past year at Questrom. In addition to the MBA, I’m also doing a Master of Science in Digital Innovation, so I’ve had the opportunity to build some new skills around data analysis and visualization. I’ve also had the opportunity to really think critically about what motivates people, what is a reasonable growth strategy, and how to take a project from an idea to scale in a sustainable way. I think something that Questrom does really well is teamwork and team building, so I’m looking forward to bringing some of those skills in when I’m working in the community and with the other fellows and folks in the Mayor’s office.