A chance meeting with the head of New Jersey’s Office of The Secretary of Higher Education (OSHE) changed the course of Josefina Ewins CCAS’22 GSC’23’s professional life.
The South Jersey native, then a senior at Rutgers University–Camden, joined an on-campus roundtable discussion between student leaders and Secretary Brian Bridges. Ewins, enrolled in the accelerated B.A./M.P.A. program offered by Rutgers–Camden’s Department of Public Policy and Administration, was instantly intrigued by Bridges’s vision for higher-education policy at the state level.
Now, Ewins serves as a policy analyst for OSHE, where she studies New Jersey’s most pressing education issues, particularly around equity and student mental health.
As a undergraduate studying political science and philosophy, Ewins arrived at Rutgers–Camden with a deep-rooted sense of civic engagement instilled by her parents, an auto shop owner and a nurse, who were active in their communities. In Ewins’s words, they “focused on how we create a sense of community where we are.”
Ewins cultivated that engagement as a Bonner Civic Scholar, an initiative of the Division of Diversity, Inclusion, and Community Engagement (DICE), where select students commit to service opportunities and hone their leadership skills.
As part of this program, Ewins coordinated an oral history project that chronicled the impact of police and education reform on Camden residents. Ewins presented her team’s research at the Global Forum on Higher Education Leadership for Democracy, Sustainability, and Social Justice in Ireland; the project is slated to be published for Rutgers–Camden’s centennial next year.
Ewins's college experience was shaped by roles as a resident assistant, student government representative, and Afro Latinx leader. She learned of a fellowship opportunity with Unidos US, a Washington, DC-based civil rights and advocacy nonprofit, through a classmate, who told her, “‘I see you doing this great work. I want to make sure that you're able to do it on a grander scale,’” Ewins recalled.
“The sense of community at Rutgers–Camden is something that I don't think I could have gotten at any other institution," Ewins said. “There were so many students wanting to uplift and not compete with one another, which was just really refreshing and enlightening.”
As her policymaking impacts students, Ewins is keenly interested in bringing their voices to the statehouse. She and colleagues are leading a student mental health initiative, working with student ambassadors from across the state to put together a summit at the end of the year. She is especially proud of her office’s U-Will Partnership, a program to offer free, virtual mental health services to college students in New Jersey, and the Some College, No Degree initiative, launched in 2023 to re-enroll statewide adult learners who have “stopped out” of college.
Ewins said many of her colleagues are New Jersey university graduates like herself, bringing their own identities and passions into what they do. "Before I worked in state government, I thought of people punching in and out, not really wanting to see that work unfold, but just being able to work with people in all different divisions of my office is the highlight of some of the work that I do,” she said. “It’s definitely the people who make it important to me, who make my work feel less like work."
The alumna plans to elevate her own learning, going back to school to pursue a doctorate with a focus on intersectional policy. “In a more concrete sense, I would love to work at an institution and, thinking about all the different opportunities that I had as a student, figure out a way to really create those same opportunities at different institutions,” Ewins said.
Ewins’s alma mater continues to shape her future even as she progresses in her policymaking career. “Rutgers–Camden prepared me to always keep questioning and think of community first in all that I do,” Ewins said. “That really sticks with me as I navigate things.”
