Alumni Profiles

Miranda Bodfish - Class of 2012

Country Officer, CDC's Division of Global HIV/AIDS

Miranda Bodfish

Can you describe your role at the CDC?

I am currently serving as a Country Officer in CDC's Division of Global HIV/AIDS. My role is to provide management and operational support to CDC's HIV/AIDS programs in several of our offices overseas.  The role varies from day to day and country to country, but basically I'm a liaison between CDC headquarters and the field. This position is part of the Presidential Management Fellowship program, a two year program in federal agencies for candidates who are completing a graduate program.  So, in addition to my role as a Country Officer, I'm part of a cohort of fellows at CDC and across federal agencies.

What have been the most rewarding and challenging parts of your job so far?

There are so many rewarding parts of the job. I work on an amazing team of other country officers who are really motivated and experienced, we have a lot of support to learn and grow within the agency, and I have learned so much about how the U.S. government operates overseas. The most challenging part of the job is that the learning curve is really steep, and depends on the unique needs and priorities of each country. So, I constantly feel like I have more to learn in order to be effective in my role.  This is especially hard because my position is based in Atlanta, but the work I'm involved in is happening overseas.  Fortunately, I have had some opportunities to travel to get oriented and provide in-country support to our programs in central Asia and eastern Europe. These experiences have helped me to develop greater understanding of the contexts we're working in, the structure of our offices, the partners we are working with, and some of the challenges that our programs face on a day-to-day basis--all the things that can be hard to understand while sitting in Atlanta.

How as your MDP degree helped you in your job?

There are a lot of ways in which MDP has prepared me for this job. I think the most important to me right now is that my experiences in MDP taught me a lot about the value of relationships in development work.  In our course on organizations in development with Andrea Rodericks and Michael Drinkwater, we examined the role that relationships play in development work, and from that point forward I realized that relationships were an underlying theme in most of our courses and field experiences. I continue to see that play out in my work. As an early-career development generalist, I have very little to offer in the way of technical expertise, especially in an agency like CDC. But my work right now doesn't require technical expertise--it requires expertise at understanding complex relationships internally and externally, and in building trust and communication so that we can move forward with the important programmatic work. MDP has given me a foundation in this area that I continue to build on. 

Any words of wisdom for future MDP graduates?

I haven't had very much time to gain substantive wisdom, but my work so far has confirmed one of the premises of MDP--that the career paths in development are not straightforward, and development practitioners are likely to work in many different fields, countries, and organizations over the course of their careers. As I talk with people I've met through this work, they often say the same thing about their careers. So, if I were to go back for a second MDP, I would focus more on skills that can be applied to just about any job in development, especially things like budgeting and financial management that are difficult to learn on the job.