Adriana D Kugler: On the road ahead, cherish the detours
Speech by Ms Adriana D Kugler, Member of the Board of Governors of the Federal
Reserve System, at the 2024 Diploma Ceremony, Frank Batten School of Leadership
and Public Policy, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia, 18 May 2024.
* * *
Thank you for your generous introduction, Dean Solomon, and thank you for the
invitation to be here and share this special day with all of you. Let me begin by
congratulating the Class of 2024. Let's give a huge round of applause to our graduates,
who are all so deserving of being recognized. And let's clap our hands together and
also congratulate the families and friends who are here, too, because-believe me, I
know-it takes a village! So let's thank all those who supported you along the way and
who made sure you had what you needed to make it here today. I want to acknowledge
that this is a real milestone. You have all accomplished so much already as you now
embark on a career in public policy and leadership. And you are now joining the many
Batten graduates who have made great contributions in careers in the service of others.
I suppose I am here, at least in part, because I represent the promise and the possibility
of a career spent in large part in public-policy-related work. I work in that city that many
of you possibly hope to work in-I am told that nearly half of master's degree students
and more than one-fourth of bachelor's degree students graduating from the Batten
School end up in Washington, D.C. In various roles, I have been fortunate enough to do
some of the kind of policy work that many of you have set your sights on. I understand
that a sizable share of Batten students indeed end up working in government but also in
think tanks, in nonprofits, and in the private sector. Some of you have worked in
Washington already or done internships there, and many of you will go forth from here
and travel the well-worn path of Routes 29 and 66, avoiding rush hour if you can and
finding two like-minded classmates so you can use the express lanes, too.
Some of you probably came to the University of Virginia (UVA) and Batten knowing
exactly what you wanted to do, with a clear view of the path to get there. Some of you
probably settled on that goal and that path over the course of your studies. Certainly,
higher education is a big investment, and everyone needs a plan for recouping that
investment-in terms of income, of course, but also in terms of opening other
opportunities that education can provide. As a professor of public policy at Georgetown,
I always hoped to provide tools that would be useful for graduating students in their new
jobs. And I do know, given the caliber of Batten, that your studies here have helped you
to not only attain the tools and knowledge you will need moving forward but also to
make the contacts and build the networks that will help you in your careers. Most
importantly, I hope that your time at UVA has opened your eyes to opportunities that
you hadn't even imagined when you first set foot on Grounds. Importantly, I do hope
that you have learned over your time here about the many ways in which public policy
work can be fulfilling for you personally and can also allow you to improve the lives of
others, whether pursuing work on housing affordability, budget priorities, or access to
health and education; building infrastructure capacity; or tackling financial stability.
Ultimately, public policy and leadership are about helping people.
It is with that latter point in mind that I am going to tell you about my own experience
and the importance of allowing yourself to take risks and follow your own path as you
pursue a career in public service. While this may contradict some of the advice you
have received about managing your careers, I strongly believe that it will make you
more successful and more fulfilled in the long run.
I tell you this because I am probably an unlikely person to have been appointed to the
Federal Reserve Board, as the first Latin policymaker in the Fed's history. I was raised
in Colombia and came to the United States at age 15, speaking almost no English. I
attended public schools. In high school, I carried around to every class one of those
thick Merriam-Webster dictionaries because, of course, back then there was no Google
Translate on smartphones, and also no smartphones!
Another thing I carried with me, along with my dictionary, was the memory from my
childhood of traveling around Colombia with my parents and witnessing great poverty
and the suffering and social problems that come from poverty. At an early age, my
brother and I would accompany my parents to shantytowns around Bogota to help with
social projects, and we traveled the countryside to visit my maternal grandparents, who
lived in one of the poorest states in the country. I would spend my summer with my
grandparents since both my parents worked. My grandfather, who had to leave high
school as a teenager to help his widowed mother raise his five siblings, would take us
to his dairy farm at four o'clock in the morning to help milk the cows and put the milk in
stainless steel tanks. Traveling the unpaved roads into town, we would then stop at
various stores to sell the milk. But my grandpa's day was just getting started, because
he was also the mayor of his town, and every morning, he would open his office and
deal with the business of being mayor. While my grandpa never graduated from high
school, he was an autodidact, and he worked hard to put all his siblings and his six
children through college, and he saw serving as mayor as a way to help his neighbors.
The memories of my grandfather overcoming many obstacles but also devoting his life
to helping others were certainly an inspiration and remain a source of motivation for me
even today. In fact, I remember going back to visit my grandparents over the years,
summer after summer, and seeing the new roads that had been paved and the
improved school and health clinic in the town and seeing how a life devoted to public
service can improve lives.
So when going to college, while not totally definite about what to study, I found that the
memories from my childhood and the desire to find ways to address poverty guided my
decision to gravitate toward economics and political science, and I figured the best path
for me was to work in public policy. In particular, I discovered that economics was a
science that would allow me to better combine my interest in math with my desire to
help address poverty, so I moved in that direction, pursuing a PhD.
I want to emphasize that my career was not linear or perfectly planned, but rather I
have chosen to take detours. And, importantly, I have chosen to take risks along the
way. Yet what was always a constant was my commitment to use my technical
expertise to tackle poverty and social challenges. But I also could have never imagined
that some of the detours I took would actually help me down the road in preparing me
for my current role.
As an undergrad, I decided to apply out of the blue for an internship with the junior
senator from Maryland at the time, Senator Barbara Mikulski, only because I read a
newspaper article about her work in the Senate as the daughter of Polish immigrants,
which really resonated with me. Little did I know that I was going to be back at the Hart
building a few decades later, making the rounds to meet with various senators as I
prepared for my Senate confirmation for the Federal Reserve. In grad school, I spent
time as a visitor both at the Brookings Institution and at the San Francisco Fed-where I
worked on my PhD research while surrounded by policy-focused professionals.
Stepping into these institutions pushed me out of my comfort zone and into the world of
policy and discussions about what it took to prepare for Federal Open Market
Committee (FOMC) meetings while I was a grad student immersed in a highly technical
PhD. program. Little did I know that I was going to be back at the Fed attending those
FOMC meetings myself and at Brookings just a few months ago giving my first speech
as a governor. I know as students, many of you have already done internships and
searched for these opportunities around policymaking, and I want to tell you that this is
exactly what will make you grow moving forward. Like me, you may someday be
surprised to find yourself revisiting those important places where you once studied and
learned, but now as a senior professional in a position to provide service in a very
different way.
For decades, I spent much of my career in academia pursuing answers to my big
questions on poverty by doing research and teaching at universities. Throughout, I
always focused on those same questions that drove me to study economics in the first
place-and always with my sights on the role of policy and the implications for real
people, like my grandpa and others I had seen in Colombia and in the United States,
who lacked opportunities. And that's when my next big detour came. Just one year after
being recruited by Georgetown, I was approached by the U.S. Department of Labor to
be its chief economist. While I knew I could contribute my knowledge in the middle of
the Great Recession about the drivers of unemployment and effective policies to create
jobs, I had never spent time working in government. This certainly pushed me out of my
comfort zone again, and I am very glad it did, because I learned a great deal about how
policy actually gets made while using my expertise and knowledge to conduct
evidencebased policymaking. Little did I know that the data on prices and employment produced
by the Labor Department would be the same data that I analyze in my current role at
the Fed, looking for evidence-based insights to make policy that benefits all Americans.
My point with all this biography is to show how the crucial professional experiences in
my life have come from keeping my options open, being open to new opportunities, and
taking risks. It is reassuring, and very tempting, to set one's sights on one and only one
goal and to stay strictly focused on the path to get there. Any map will show the most
direct route from Charlottesville to Washington-just take a right turn at Gainesville,
right? But there are other destinations, and other ways to get where you are going, that
may make the journey more enriching and rewarding. Be open to those possibilities. Be
ready to try new things. One of the things you may gain from this approach is
discovering talents and abilities that you may not know you had. To invoke a principle of
economics, trying new things and considering new possibilities may help you discover
your comparative advantage. Discovering a comparative advantage in this way is really
just about learning more about yourself, a more general goal for life that I would
recommend to everyone. And you may be surprised at how often the winding road
brings you back to old landmarks you may have previously visited, but now with a
stronger set of tools for providing service.
As I said earlier, this approach to your career planning might contradict some very good
advice from your professors and advisers, and maybe from your own parents, on how
best to use the great advantage of your education at the Batten School. By encouraging
you to step off the path now and then to consider other possibilities, I don't mean you
shouldn't work as hard as possible to achieve your goals. Absolutely you should put
your heart and soul into what you do, hopefully because you will find a job to which you
are deeply committed and you love.
My own career so far has followed a winding road. It is certainly not what I expected
when I was sitting where you are sitting today. But I'm glad I said yes, took some
chances, and experienced different kinds of jobs in different types of organizations.
Keep a lookout for opportunities and consider saying yes even if doing so might move
you off your planned path for a time. You may discover strengths and abilities you didn't
recognize before. You may develop interests and even passions that you never
expected to develop. Changing the world might begin with a change of perspective that
helps you better understand the realities around you and also yourself. Be open to all
that. Congratulations, again, to the Class of 2024, and the best of luck wherever the
road takes you. And if that is the Fed, please do make sure to pop in to say hi!