The Master of Public Policy candidate talks about how GPS is equipping her to take action against water pollution, all while coaching the sport she loves
Julia Hill ’24 has been fencing for a long time, and just as long as she has been interested in the science of the oceans.
As an undergraduate at UC San Diego, she pursued both of these together, competing on the university’s fencing team while studying environmental systems.
Walking across the stage with her bachelor’s degree wasn’t the end of the story, however. GPS News talked with Hill to learn about what drew her to continue her education at the School of Global Policy and Strategy (GPS) in the Master of Public Policy (MPP) degree program, and how she’s balancing that with her new role as an assistant coach for UC San Diego’s fencing team.
GPS: What’s your background in fencing? How have you pursued it at GPS?
Julia Hill: Before I was a fencing coach, I was an NCAA fencer at UC San Diego during my time as an undergrad. But I started fencing way before that, when I was around 11. Because of the way COVID disrupted everything, I got an extra year of eligibility, so for my first year of the master’s program at GPS, I actually was still an athlete. So I figured for my second and final year as a grad student, I would coach for the team if they would have me — and they did, so here I am.
GPS: How have you balanced being a fencer, and now a coach, with pursuing a full-time graduate degree?
JH: It’s probably not the easiest thing in the world to do! It’s really just about making sure you manage your time and you prioritize correctly. At this point, having been a student athlete for so much of my life, I know exactly how long things are going to take me, so I can schedule pretty well. Scheduling is so, so important, especially if you still want to have a social life, which I’ve somehow been managing!
GPS: What made you want to go to graduate school?
JH: I didn’t think I would be going to grad school when I first started as an undergrad, but as I progressed, I felt like I wanted to do more schooling, and I knew that I probably wanted to have a government position. So I figured getting more education in something like public policy would really help with my career going forward, and I thought GPS would be a good pathway to do that. I’d like to work specifically with surface water policy or regulation, or coastal conservation. That’s always what I’ve wanted to do.
What got you interested in that? And how have you developed that interest from high school to now, as a graduate student?
Even from a young age, I was a big Animal Planet kind of kid. I was always interested in science. I grew up near the beach, in Orange County, so I’ve been going to the beach my whole life. Then in high school I took AP Environmental Science, and I had a really great teacher for that. Some of the projects we did in that class, studying water quality at our local pier, really piqued my interest. So I thought it’d be really fun to have a job in that field one day, which I actually did end up doing: I was a stormwater field scientist before I got to GPS.
I was working for an environmental consulting company for a while doing that, here in San Diego. It was fun! I really enjoyed that job. But when you’re doing consulting, it’s a lot of monitoring, and it’s not a lot of actually enacting change. I wanted to be more involved in the process of fixing the things that I would see were wrong when I was out doing monitoring.
How did you decide on GPS as the place to study?
Professor Morgan Levy was a very positive influence on me. I was looking for a faculty supervisor for my senior thesis project, which was about atmospheric river events and surface water quality. And then I happened upon professor Levy’s research, and I thought it was really interesting. So I scheduled a meeting with her and talked with her about it, and she became my faculty mentor for the whole year. She also invited me to take her graduate-level hydrology class. She saw that I wanted to go to grad school, so she encouraged me to look into it, and she was happy to write my letter of recommendation.
GPS: What’s your favorite class that you’ve taken so far?
JH: I’m taking one at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography right now, Ocean Law and Policy, which is kind of my jam. It’s definitely my favorite class right now, because it’s geared toward what I’d like to do for my career. We’re learning about the U.S. court system, how court decisions influence policies, how case law is kind of a policy in itself — and how all of these impact the ocean. We also talk a lot about California’s policies specifically.
GPS: Now that you’ve been studying at GPS, what’s one area that you feel more confident in when it comes to doing that type of work?
JH: I have a better grasp on enforcement and regulation. In my consulting job, when I would go out to monitor stuff, there would be certain industries that would be illegally polluting. Although we would report it, we would go to that same site for a few weeks, and the offender would still be polluting. The MPP program makes me better equipped to know the regulations, which will hopefully let me get into a position where I can be the person who prioritizes these kinds of things. I think that would be awesome.
