Camille Caterina MIA ’21 says her GPS degree prepared her to analyze immigration statistics for the Department of Homeland Security
It was “The Daily Show,” the Comedy Central program hosted by Jon Stewart, that first got Camille Caterina interested in politics.
“That show made me want to understand the world around me,” she said. “It really pushed me into taking classes in international political science.”
After studying political science as an undergraduate, she decided to stay at UC San Diego to pursue a Master of International Affairs (MIA) degree at the School of Global Policy and Strategy (GPS), which she graduated with in 2021. The International Studies Program enabled her to incorporate some of the graduate coursework into her undergraduate studies, and this flexibility was one of several reasons that she decided it was the best fit for her.
Now, Caterina is using the skills she gained in the MIA program — in which she pursued the Latin American regional specialization and the international economics track — to monitor how government policies impact patterns of immigration at the U.S.-Mexico border.
“When you’re an undergrad, you might just talk to your professor to find out what’s going to be on the midterm,” Caterina said. “But at GPS, I was able to go much deeper into the topics I was studying with my professors. I could talk to them about their current research, or ask questions about stuff they mentioned in the book they wrote.”
At the Office of Homeland Security Statistics, she started as a data scientist before working her way up to her current position of statistician on the office’s response and preparedness sections for emergency management and maritime.
Working at the office under Executive Director Marc Rosenblum — himself a UC San Diego alumnus — Caterina has employed the analytical skills she developed at GPS to monitor immigration.
“I’m proud to provide quality data and reports to decision-makers guided by facts and numbers, not political agendas,” Caterina said.
She and her colleagues are tasked with determining whether certain immigration measures are actually making a difference in the number of migrants at the border. For example, she collected and analyzed data for a recent policy that allowed migrants eligible for asylum to receive relief quickly, and which also let people from Venezuela, Haiti, Cuba and Nicaragua enter the U.S. directly via airplane.
“Having a knowledge of Latin America has definitely helped because it allows me to add context to reports that would otherwise have gone unnoticed,” she said.
But as much as these issues are wont to make national headlines, especially in the run-up to the 2024 presidential election, Caterina emphasized that this doesn’t affect the integrity of the research that she carries out.
“I’m proud to provide quality data and reports to decision-makers guided by facts and numbers, not political agendas,” she said.
And since GPS stands out for its rigor when it comes to data analysis, Caterina says that she still keeps notes from her GPS classes handy so that she can consult them in her work.
“In our work, we use Python, Stata and R, which are things I learned at GPS,” she said. “If I have a question about any of those programs, I’ll just think, ‘Oh, we did that in class!’ And then I can look it up in my notes.”
