Vanessa Corlazzoli

Vanessa Corlazzoli, 2011, Canada and Uruguay

Director of Design, Monitoring and Evaluation, Search for Common Ground – Washington, DC 

What skills did you gain at Fletcher that make you particularly marketable?

At the Fletcher School, I was able to gain technical and practical skills. The flexibility of the curriculum enabled me to improve my negotiation, budgeting, and project management skills. I acquired key quantitative and qualitative skills, while learning about design, monitor, and evaluation theory. In today’s competitive job market, employers are looking to hire individuals that are ready to work and can produce immediate results. It was great to come out of Fletcher with a ready-to-use toolkit and feel that I could immediately add value to my employer.

How my experience at Fletcher has changed the way I look at the world: We no longer live in an isolated world. Major international events have an impact on the way governments tackle policy options, companies diversify their business portfolios, and non-governmental organizations implement programs.  Fletcher encouraged me to think critically and strategically about local events while placing them within a global context. I learned to not only make links between actions taken by different levels of governments, but also across industry sectors. In order to tackle today’s most complex problems, we must keep in mind the many diverse actors that continuously influence one another.