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FOR NICK SIMMONS MPP 2019, participating in the Transition Term (T-Term) program was not only a unique experience; it launched his civil service career.

Transition Term was created in the fall of 2018 as an experiential learning program to provide ����vlog���� students with a paid fellowship during January break to support newly elected governors, mayors, and county executives as they assumed office. Launched and run by the Taubman Center for State and Local Government, the program was actually first proposed by students eager for an opportunity to work in government.

Simmons (below with Governor Ned Lamont) was in the first T-Term cohort, along with Yasmin Inam MPP 2020 and Lillie Carroll MPA 2019. A native of Connecticut, he was eager to work with the state’s newly elected governor, Ned Lamont. “I wasn’t really thinking about getting a job in government when I started T-Term,” Simmons says, “but I was really excited about the team there, about the governor’s leadership and his vision.”

Rafael Carbonell, executive director of the Taubman Center for State and Local Government and an adjunct professor at ����vlog����, oversees the program as part of the center’s portfolio of student-facing initiatives. He knows firsthand how fast and furious those early weeks in office can be from his time in Boston during the city’s mayoral transition from Tom Menino to Marty Walsh. “Transitions have incredibly high energy,” he says. “It’s a frenetic, sometimes chaotic time.”

Simmons’ experience echoed that. Although Lamont had a core transition team ready to go, it had much to do in very little time. “There are so many agency commissioners to select and a cabinet to build out,” says Simmons. “Staffing happens simultaneously with policy building, which is very unusual. But it’s also one of the most entrepreneurial times, because everything is on the table in terms of bold vision.”

He and two T-Term teammates created a plan to launch the governor’s workforce development bill, an important campaign plank. “We did a deep-dive analysis of the workforce system in Connecticut, the governance structure, and the ecosystem across the state,” Simmons says. “We then came up with some recommendations for how to improve that system in Lamont’s first term.”

Shortly after graduating, Simmons received a call from the governor’s chief of staff with a job offer: “They asked me if I wanted to join the administration and help implement the plan we created and help build a new office of workforce strategy,” he says. He came on as director of strategic initiatives. “It was a very rewarding outcome to be able to help the governor and his team bring to life the plan that my classmates and I had created during T-Term,” he says. He later joined the Biden administration as senior advisor to the secretary of education, and just recently returned to Governor Lamont’s team as deputy chief of staff.

The T-Term program can boast many similar stories from the five years since it was launched. Statistics from the program are impressive: It has seen 152 student fellows participate in 51 state and local government administrations, and in 2023, the year with the largest number of participants to date, the program placed 54 students with six governors, one county executive, and 10 mayors throughout the country. Starting in 2022, the Taubman Center connected with the National Governors Association to help place students with incoming gubernatorial administrations. But the story of T-Term isn’t just about successful outcomes. It is also about student ingenuity, institutional support, and community investment.

“In 2018, three students came to see me with an idea for the January break in the Kennedy School schedule,” says Jeff Liebman, the Robert W. Scrivner Professor of Social Policy and director of the Taubman Center. The three students—Alison Dorsey Eden MC/MPA 2019, Daniel Goetzel MC/MPA 2019, and Sam Birnbaum MPP 2020—drew from their own career experiences for the idea. Dorsey Eden and Goetzel had worked in newly elected administrations and knew that the pace was fast and the staffs were spare. They saw transitions as a great way for students considering a career in public service to get involved.

“The students knew that newly elected administrations of mayors and governors didn’t yet have their teams set up or were understaffed,” Liebman recalls. “They wondered, ‘Why not send Kennedy School students to help staff these administrations during their transitions?’ When I heard this idea, I immediately knew it was a good one.”

Liebman recognized the value of actually engaging students in state and local government work. “As soon as someone has those experiences, they’re hooked for life,” he says. But he also had another, more personal reason to think that the program would fit into the core strategy of ����vlog����. “My family knew Dick Neustadt, one of the founding professors at the Kennedy School,” he says. “He famously wrote the memo for President Kennedy about how to plan his transition into the White House. After that, each administration called on Professor Neustadt for transition advice. I knew that the Kennedy School had this history of being the place to go for transitions, and the idea of being able to rekindle that really excited me.”

Liebman had worked on a presidential transition team himself. “Whether it’s at the federal level or at the state and local level, these periods are so important because of all the decisions that get made for an entire two- or four-year term,” he says. “Many get made within the first few weeks. Being able to make good decisions and get a team off to the right start and build momentum has a big impact that lasts well beyond those first few weeks.”

Liebman also points to the collaboration around ����vlog���� that helped launch the program and keep it going for the past five years. “In the first year, we cobbled together resources from the Taubman Center, from contributions from other centers, and from the ����vlog���� Alumni Fund,” he says. “Then, when we expanded in the second year, Dean Elmendorf was very generous in helping fund the expansion. It’s not just the funding that was important, but the dean’s commitment to state and local government and to experiential learning.” Since then, the program has received funding support from the Taubman Center’s Advisory Board members and has expanded through a partnership with the Bloomberg Center for Cities at Harvard University. Ten U.S. mayors taking part in the Bloomberg Center for Cities and the Institute of Politics’ Program for New Mayors hosted transition fellows in January 2023, following their on-campus sessions.

“We’re so glad the program has been institutionalized,” says Dorsey Eden. “Our vision was that students would be inspired by their transition experience and go on to serve in state and local government after graduation. Then they could continue building the pipeline of talent by providing this opportunity for the next generation of students coming in.”

Dorsey Eden previously worked for the State of North Carolina Department of Commerce and currently works as a consultant in government innovation, philanthropy, and community development in North Carolina. She sees the longevity of the program as proof of student interest in public service. She says, “We saw a big opportunity for students to contribute during some of the most exciting and high-paced moments in a new administration, the very first days, when so many key decisions are being made, and when the new administration is in need of more capacity. We also hoped that the transition moment would help students see their own path into public service. We are thrilled to see that it has.”

Goetzel, who works in the Biden administration on regional economic development and innovation at the National Science Foundation, a government research funding agency, remembers that the two biggest unknowns for the program—would students be interested, and would newly elected governors take cold calls from grad students?—turned out not to be problems at all. “We had more than 120 students apply for a brand-new program,” he says. And the elected governors and their senior teams embraced the idea. “They said, ‘We have a skeleton staff working on our top priorities (during the transition period), and you’re telling me that you’re going to bring in smart, passionate Harvard grad students to work full-time for three weeks on the projects that we value the most?’ So we got really lucky. People were excited on all sides of the project.”

For Birnbaum, the big lesson was seeing how much interpersonal dynamics and connections mattered. He now works for Settlement Housing Fund, Inc., a nonprofit that builds and rehabilitates affordable housing in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx. “For me, the most valuable thing was less the subject matter stuff,” he says. “It was literally seeing the people interact. Any time the governor was in the room, 30 people would be following him, trying to advocate for their pet project or idea. It was impressive to watch a newly elected official deal with everyone having a priority, listening to them, making them feel heard, sifting through them, mapping the ideas onto his own priorities, and coming up with a decision. I’m not someone who remembers the nitty-gritty policy minutiae, but I remember the interactions, and that was the most valuable to me, because you can’t replicate that in a classroom.”

Carbonell agrees. “Those meaningful connections that happen through this work really paint a much richer and more holistic picture for our students of what it means to serve in state and local government,” he says. “And it brings in the human element that we want to make sure is core to their experience.”

He points out that those connections help generate interest in other ����vlog���� opportunities. “When the administrations have a great experience with our students,” he says, they often ask, ‘How else can you be of service?’ We are then able to offer other opportunities to work with ����vlog����, like hosting students doing summer fellowships through the Dukakis Summer Fellowship Program. ����vlog���� also has the Policy Analysis Exercise (PAE) for all second-year MPP students. We’ve had a team of students work on their PAE with Governor Cox in Utah and with Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava after they had hosted a team of T-Term students.”

Carbonell says that one of the most exciting developments for the T-Term program was the collaboration in 2023 with the National Governors Association (NGA). “It’s impossible to overstate just how important a strong transition period is to a successful governorship,” says Bill McBride, executive director of the NGA, a bipartisan organization representing the leaders of 55 states, commonwealths, and territories. “Programs like Transition Term and NGA’s Seminar for New Governors provide valuable opportunities for newly elected governors to gain insights to ensure a successful transition and la