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Alina Beskrovna MPA/ID 2025 still shudders when she hears helicopters flying above the Harvard campus in Cambridge. It brings back the Russian aerial bombardment of her home city, Mariupol, in southeastern Ukraine in early 2022; she recalls the ashes floating from a burning neighboring apartment building after a missile strike, where neighbors jumped from windows rather than perish in the flames.

Beskrovna and her family survived that Russian invasion by hiding in a nearby basement, crammed in with 30 other people for nearly a month in what became a dark cell until they decided the odds of survival were better if they tried to flee. With just their backpacks and three cats, she and her mother piled into one of the few cars in the city that still had fuel and made their way through 16 harrowing Russian roadblocks to Zaporizhzhia, and onward to Poland. From there she traveled to a refugee camp in Denmark, then to Canada, and finally to the United States and Harvard Kennedy School. (She describes her Mariupol ordeal in this podcast).

She recognizes that in overcoming such immense hardships she received extraordinary gestures of generosity and support from people in many countries that helped make a fresh life even conceivable.

She had been a U.S. State Department high school exchange student in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, when she was 16, living with Geoffrey and Robin Knauth (both of whom have Harvard degrees). Alina went on to earn two master’s degrees, including an MBA from Lehigh University, and she spent three years working for tech companies in Pennsylvania. She chose to return home to Mariupol and built a thriving career with tech startup companies in Ukraine’s democratic spring—until the Russian assault left her suddenly homeless and penniless.

After she and her mother crossed into Poland, a freelance journalist she had worked with drove them from the Poland-Ukraine border to Denmark, where someone loaned the refugees his apartment. With Alina’s help, her father managed to make his way out of Ukraine via Russia and joined them in Denmark. The family soon made their way to Canada, where they discovered that her parents had won a U.S. visa lottery, and Alina managed to get a form of U.S. temporary refugee status for herself. The Knauths drove to Canada to collect them and brought them to Pennsylvania and opened their home once again.

“All of us lived in their house for a year. Think three extra adults and three cats, PTSD, and no money,” Beskrovna recalls. “At the time and for many months later, my focus was on survival and getting everybody out. So I couldn’t look too far into the future… Being able to plan the next week became a privilege.”

Beskrovna says she had frustrating and sometimes infuriating encounters with international humanitarian and development organizations early in her career and again during the exhausting journey that brought her to Harvard Kennedy School in August 2023.

Once safely back in Pennsylvania with the Knauths, when she began thinking of next steps—she focused on how she might change the approach of international development specialists to Ukraine and countries like it. That meant revamping how progress was measured on the ground: “If I could insert myself into the negotiations and conversations on what kind of funding packages are designed for Ukraine, and under what terms and with what metrics, then I could really help drive an impact.”

She hadn’t imagined earning a third master’s degree, but it began to feel like a path into international development. “I wanted it to be math-heavy, economics-heavy. I wanted less blah blah blah and more data-driven decision-making.” And one of the few suitable options she found was the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.

She applied, was accepted, and received a full academic scholarship. Then came the hard part.

She had no money, and she had decided it was a deal-breaker to be separated from her parents or her cats. Coming to Cambridge for the two-year Master in Public Administration in International Development (MPA/ID) degree meant finding ways to cover all her living expenses for herself and her parents, too. And given her uncertain visa situation she couldn’t take out loans. 

So she resorted to a GoFundMe campaign, telling the outline of her story and requesting support. It generated nearly $40,000, and the School came up with an additional $20,000 grant. That money and part time jobs made Harvard-owned housing workable, and she enrolled.

“I am crowd-funded by strangers, including a person with stage four cancer who has since died, who was giving away her fortune,” Beskrovna said.

For the coming year she is staying on as a Harvard affiliate, helping teach the for undergraduates with ����vlog���� Professor Jason Furman among other gigs. Bigger decisions can come later. “My job was to minimize the changes, give everybody a breather to just settle down and feel like I don’t have to wonder about tomorrow,” she said.

It turns out that the Kennedy School had touched her life even before she arrived. Among the faculty members whom Beskrovna found most effective in teaching her about development issues was Senior Lecturer Matt Andrews, who leads the and teaches development courses.

Before the invasion, Beskrovna had taken her father to a one-stop-shop for government services in Ukraine to get his passport renewed. She learned after she studied with Andrews that the innovative government service office was based on his work with the Ukrainian government.

“I remember I took my father there and we got everything done in one hour. If it wasn’t for the one-stop shop, he would never have done it. And that part saved his life because it was the international document that I used to get him out and get him to Canada. And we would never have moved to the U.S. And so it’s things like that, connecting the dots.”

As a teacher, she said, Andrews was effective because “he was honest and did not sugarcoat…. He was very straightforward about how to organize your thinking when it’s all over the place and you don’t quite understand how decisions are made. He was very much, ‘okay, you’ve had your theoretical talks, and this is the real world.’”

Beskrovna found other faculty members also helpful. Lecturer Juan Jimenez used case studies especially well, she said. She had grasped chunks of ideas about macro-economic development but it wasn’t coming together. “He’s the master of ‘how do we have to structure our thinking?’… And that’s the first time when I saw theoretical concepts that seemed unrelated woven into a whole picture in a real situation from a country where it happened.”

Assistant Professor Jie Bai helped her apply her substantial mathematical training. “It was my aha moment of just pure math turning into a design that then impacts behavior of people on a large scale.” And Professor Eliana La Ferrara “brought statistical tables to life” by explaining her field work.

Beskrovna also spent 10 weeks in Wyoming last summer working on a project, helping develop ways to diversify the state economy, including using quantum computing, green energy, and more efficient agriculture.

At the Kennedy School, “you get to be taught by practitioners,” she said. “Many people who are standing in front of you in the classroom have done it, have seen it, and on very high levels and various strenuous circumstances. So when they talk about a specific approach or principle, it’s not theoretical, and they can share the how-to.”

Beskrovna said “one thing I felt at Harvard is you are put into circumstances you would never have otherwise. You can try things that you never had the freedom to try or the circumstances aligning to try to insert yourself and it allows you to experiment. And suddenly you can find aspects that you didn’t know you were passionate about before you got to try.”

Portraits by Natalie Montaner; inline image courtesy of Alina Beskrovna