While the start of the COVID-19 pandemic brought a barrage of stressors, that didn’t stop Meredith McVadon ’20 from landing the right job for her skillset. McVadon serves as the fundraising and marketing intern at the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), where she puts her backgrounds in policy and communications to work supporting the program’s fundraising efforts.
“I studied policy because of the emphasis on social justice,” said McVadon. “I’m able to apply skills of writing, persuasion and keeping up with the news cycle from my communications background to aid my mission to cause change in the world and address critical issues.”
UNDP is an agency of the UN that focuses on sustainable development and poverty reduction. At UNDP, McVadon has been working on crafting content and digital ads to promote crowdfunding campaigns across the world.
“Everything has a COVID-19 lens because the economic and health impacts are so drastic,” she explains. Traditionally, aid comes from governments partnered with the UN. Alternatively, the crowdfunding campaigns seek individual donors to support localized campaigns that help the most vulnerable prepare for, respond to and recover from the pandemic.
And while the job was a perfect match for her background, McVadon stresses another aspect of the process that helped her get where she is today: networking. As COVID-19 continues to affect job searches/the job market, traditional tactics are as important as ever. For McVadon, that meant making use of the expansive UMD alumni network.
She currently works with fellow alum Gwynne Gauntlett ’88, who serves as the senior director of digital marketing and fundraising at UNDP. McVadon says Gauntlett has looked out for her professional development, allowing McVadon to grow her Spanish skills by translating content, a skill she honed during her study abroad trips in Latin America.
“This is my first new job outside of graduation and it's with somebody that lives in the area who went to [UMD] and cared enough to even bring it up during the interview,” McVadon says. “It definitely added a level of comfort.”
For students currently job searching or getting ready to enter the job market, McVadon urges putting just as much emphasis on networking as applying, whether it is through building connections or making use of connections you already have.
If “networking” sounds intimidating, McVadon suggests practicing during your time at SPP. For her, it started with her professors, and extended beyond graduation with the SPP mentor program.
“Whenever I went to office hours, I felt like professors were willing to support me and were passionate about what they were teaching,” McVadon says. “That put me in a good position to network at UNDP and feel comfortable requesting to get virtual lunch with people. It helped me realize the power of building relationships.”
UMDPolicyJobs is an exclusive resource for SPP students, giving them access to hundreds of policy-relevant opportunities. Updated daily, it facilitates employer-student interaction and is a key starting point for any policy-related internship or job search. Contact Bryan Kempton at bkempton@umd.edu or Theo Caruthers at theocar@umd.edu for more information about career services.