Public Administration Beckons - Personal Statement Example

Public administration calls for a deep sense of responsibility and organization, foresight, leadership, and away with people. It also requires a steep grounding in accounting and management. In municipal and state governments, public administration means running programs on a multitude of concerns such as health, highway, fire, police, water, transportation, electricity, gas, care of parks and recreation facilities, development of natural resources, public housing, and urban renewal. A public administrator sees the proper staffing pattern for sanitation services, clerical, and maintenance connected with the above functions.

You will never find a more edifying set of challenges in other careers or professions where self-interest is the chief motivation for work. I had a foretaste of these challenges when, while completing my BBA at the North Carolina Central University in 1980, I served as a board member of the NCCU Campus Ministries and the Senior and Law Enforcement Working Together Council. These two concurrent positions involved managing people to work for the common good which jobs, in all modesty, I handled quite well.

When I got my BBA, I know it provided me part of the academic credentials to launch a career in public administration. Other factors that influenced and firmed up that decision came when I went out to work in private companies for a start. First I served as a unit director for 10 years, in which I handled 50-65 people, and then as a management-level housing-weathering coordinator in another company for five years where I was in charge of 10 employees. Public administration began to beckon more animatedly when I worked for the city government, first as a transport consultant and then as a community relations coordinator.

As a transport consultant for eight years, I drafted ordinances and prepared the agenda for the city council. As community relations coordinator, I worked on programs to improve the public image of the city government. Now, my desire to go into public administration is as intense as ever and I am on the way to attending the NCCU Graduate School on Executive Master of Public Administration to give me a better grasp of local government, law, personnel, and budgeting functions. This will widen and improve my work experience and academic background in business administration, which is one of the prime requisites for a career in public administration.

For starters, most of the public administration functions are business in nature, such as public utility. A public utility provides services like light, heat, power, telephone, telegraph, water, garbage disposal, mail delivery, transportation, etc. Some of the public utility companies are owned by private entities but the government has to regulate the ways in which they are run. In many cases, a public utility company operates a monopoly on a particular service, such that a crisis occurs when a strike takes place and garbage is not collected or the trains fail to run.

I know I have had the necessary preparations to handle such a situation, which knowledge I hope to elevate with a Master of Public Administration degree.