Makkah Ali ’10 graduated from Wellesley with a degree in Peace & Justice Studies and Religion. After graduation, Makkah joined the AmeriCorps; she has since earned her master’s degree at George Mason’s School for Conflict Analysis and Resolution. Currently, Makkah is a Mediator and Program Associate at the Meridian Institute in Washington, D.C.
Please give a brief background on yourself and your career.
The entire time I was a student at Wellesley I worked at the Center for Work and Service (CWS), which is the best job any student could have. At the CWS, I learned how to put together a resume and cover letter, how to identify and build on my strengths, where to seek opportunities, how to make a plan for myself and implement it, and so much more. The skills that I learned at CWS have been extremely helpful in professional and personal life since I graduated.
The summer before college, I got my first job. I worked as a communications intern at the City of Atlanta’s Office of Communication under Mayor Shirley Franklin. Working in city government was my first experience in a professional setting and exposed me to what a life of public service might look like. I then spent my three college summers doing extremely different things— working at an environmental consulting firm, studying abroad in Istanbul, and co-teaching a life skills course for chronically homeless adults. After I graduated, I served as an AmeriCorps member with a nonprofit in Boston called Peace First, where I taught conflict resolution skills to elementary school students through experiential learning activities and community service projects.
After AmeriCorps, I knew I was onto something with this conflict resolution thing, so I typed the phrase “conflict resolution” into the search bar of a job site and applied to the only job that popped up. I moved to Washington, D.C. to work at an organization called Meridian Institute that designs collaborative processes and facilitates consensus around complex and controversial policy issues. During my two-year fellowship, I also pursued my master’s degree at George Mason’s School for Conflict Analysis and Resolution, which resulted in many late nights but also many great opportunities. Unlike some of my classmates who had less work experience, I knew how the theories and concepts I was learning could apply in the “real world.” I was able to use grad school as a chance to ask deeper questions and better understand some of the things I was seeing at work. At the same time, I was able to use my job as a place to test out some of the tools I learned about at school. At the end of my fellowship, I applied for a job as a mediator at my organization and have been working in that capacity for about a year.
How has your career changed since you originally envisioned it at Wellesley? What other careers did you consider as a student?
I started at Wellesley wanting to be a writer, but after a pretty terrible experience in my Writing 125 class I decided to look at other traditional options like law school. The Peace and Justice Studies major was the best thing that could have happened to me because it showed me that there are so many different, creative ways to engage in the issues that I cared about. Also, because it’s a major that many people haven’t heard of it, it gave me practice articulating my unconventional interests. After I declared my major, the original plan was to do service work abroad after college and then apply to graduate school, but when those plans didn’t materialize I decided to put a domestic spin on my desire to do service by applying to AmeriCorps.
How has Wellesley contributed to your career?
Aside from the incredible life skills I acquired through my job at the CWS, Wellesley has contributed to my career in many more subtle, less visible ways. My interdisciplinary major allowed me to take classes in many different departments, so I was able to see that there are many ways to analyze and solve the problems of the world. My senior year I was able to participate in the Wellesley Debates and I chose to advocate for a position that I didn’t actually believe in. That experience helped me understand that people who hold opinions that I don’t agree with are not necessarily wrong, they have simply led lives very different from my own which have led them to a very different set of conclusions. The ability to respect and understand different perspectives is crucial in the conflict resolution field, so I’m happy that my undergraduate experiences prepared me well for that. Also, Wellesley’s small size made it so that students could interact with professors and administrators on a regular basis to ask questions, exchange ideas, and seek guidance. The chance to build informal relationships with authority figures in college helped give me confidence, comfort, and ease needed to build strong relationships with my supervisors and superiors at work over.
What is a typical work day or work week like for you?
Because my organization plans and facilitates many meetings, much of our time is spent preparing for and following up from meetings. Our busiest times of year are September through November and February through May. Typically, I get to the office around 9:00 am, check my calendar for the appointments and reminders that I have set up for the day, and review my to-do list while drinking tea and eating breakfast.
If it’s before a meeting, I may be preparing with my project team to develop meeting objectives, an agenda, identify stakeholders that need to be invited to participate, and to discuss meeting logistics. I may spend part of the day conducting research on the substantive issue that we will be holding our meeting about. I may also spend time interviewing stakeholders, taking notes, and sharing what I’m hearing with my team. I end each day by creating a list of to-dos for the next day and I usually leave the office around 6:30 pm.
If it’s after a big meeting, I spend a lot of time writing and editing documents that summarize what took place and the consensus decisions that were made. Those documents go through pretty intense revisions internally and externally before they are released.
My other responsibilities include updating project websites, drafting grant proposals and budgets, and developing team work plans and project management tools. So depending on the time of year and the stage of my projects, my weekly to-do lists look very different.
What piece of advice would you offer students looking to get into non-profit organizations?
Talk to people not only about what they currently do, but how they got there. You’ll find that very few people have taken a linear path to get to where they are, and through these conversations you will learn about organizations and opportunities that you might not have previously considered. Non-profit organizations depend heavily on the staff, so it’s important to be confident in what you can contribute. You have skills—take note of them and offer them, and your efforts and enthusiasm will be rewarded. Working for a non-profit is not always glamorous. Small organizations particularly depend on everyone to pitch in and do a little bit of everything. That means sometimes you’ll have to answer phones, restock the fridge, make copies, or clean up after a meeting in the conference room. It’s important to remember that no job is “too small,” especially when you are first starting out. If people enjoy working with you and see that you are a proactive, responsible, enthusiastic employee, they will advocate on your behalf for bigger and better opportunities.
While you’re in college and have some extra time, volunteer, get in touch with local organizations for research for a class project, do internships—all of those experiences will help you figure out what you would and would not like to do. All of those experiences will also help you build relationships with people in various fields who might think of you when opportunities emerge.
What do you wish you had known as a student?
As a woman, (and particularly as a woman of color) there is a lot of external pressure placed on me to go into fields and positions where people like me are underrepresented. Wellesley does a great job of ensuring that each student knows that there are no upper limits to what we can achieve. But I think that encouragement sometimes creates an unnecessary pressure to be something you’re not, because there’s an implicit “lower limit” to what we should be aiming for. I never wanted to own a business or be an economist, politician, or an electrical engineer, but as a student I felt like I needed to break the “glass ceiling” in something. I remember thinking that being a “woman who will” meant becoming the CEO of something. I’ve since realized that it actually means being able to define and achieve success on my own terms, and to fight against any cultural, systemic, or societal barriers that prevent women from being able to do so.
If you could come back and take one class at Wellesley what would it be?
Because I had an interdisciplinary major, I was able to take a lot of the classes that I wanted to. But if I could go back, I would probably take any of the classes offered by Smitha Radhakrishnan in the Sociology department, Nicolas de Warren in Philosophy, Stephen Marini in Religion, or Melinda Lopez in Theater Studies. Those professors really taught me how to look at a problem or an issue and think through the different ways one could reach a solution. They taught me not to be afraid to ask the tough questions and that has been the most useful skill in my career so far. Sorry I can’t just choose one!