A GPS degree gave Seth Patton MPP ’21 the skills he needed to pivot from the policy field to grant writing. He wants students and alumni to recognize its versatility, too.
Seth Patton didn’t realize how much he would enjoy working as a nonprofit grant writer until he tried it — and he found that his education at UC San Diego’s School of Global Policy and Strategy (GPS) prepared him for the role better than he could have imagined.
Patton landed at GPS after working for a few years in local government, as a land-use policy adviser for an elected official in San Diego County. He enjoyed the work, and it led him to explore degrees in public policy.
“Conveniently for me, I saw that GPS was a really highly rated program, and it was in the geographical area I already lived and worked in,” Patton said.
However, there were personnel changes at the government office where he was working, and so he ended up doing work as a grant writer for SBCS, an organization that serves children and families in the San Diego region.
Patton said that his decision to go for the Master of Public Policy (MPP) degree at GPS ended up paying dividends in his career.
While he originally intended to go back into the policy space after graduating in 2021, he found that he enjoyed grant writing — and after studying at GPS, he was much better at the part of the job that required data analysis.
“When I returned to the nonprofit sector, suddenly I had a lot of data skills and research skills that were much sharper than they were before I got my master’s degree from GPS,” he said. “I was much more equipped to be good at the job and to write successful grant proposals.”
In addition to his grant-writing work, Patton said that he is equipped to take on data analysis projects at work, even when they don’t fit neatly under his job description.
Evidently, SBCS, his employer, recognized the added value of the degree, too — and he said that he knows other organizations also hold a degree from GPS in high regard.
“I got a really significant raise as a result of getting the degree,” Patton said.
Since graduating in 2021, he has been eager to share his experience working as a grant writer with current GPS students, including at events organized by the school’s Career and Professional Development Center. He talks with GPSers about how grant writing is an in-demand skill that leverages what they learn.
“Even though GPS is a policy school and the MPP is a policy degree, the skills are really applicable to grant writing,” he said.
Studying at GPS certainly had a positive impact on Patton’s career, but it contributed to an even bigger part of his life, too: he married Summer (née Bales), his MPP classmate, in December 2023.
“My most noteworthy ‘alumni engagement’ is that I married a fellow alum,” he said.
