“CC instilled in me a value of life-long learning, the ability to stay curious, and learn new things quickly and with depth,” says Ellie Collinson ’02. “I think about all the various mentors that I encountered both on campus as a student and in the CC community, and how much that’s had an impact on me.” Collinson recently served as the Deputy Director and Chief Operating Officer of the U.S. Trade and Development Agency (USTDA), a federal organization that promotes U.S. exports by developing infrastructure projects in emerging economies.
“We help launch sustainable projects in areas like clean energy and telecom. This creates export opportunities for U.S. firms and supports good-paying jobs,” Collinson says. “I didn’t appreciate the complexity and impact of this work before I walked in the door. Certainly, the concept of life-long learning is very real.”
Prior to the USTDA, Collinson spent a decade doing lobby work in Washington, D.C. “The Block Plan gave me a really good academic preparation for what it means to have to deep dive into a substantive issue quickly and fully.” Collinson then did operations and financial work for the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee and was initially appointed by the Biden-Harris Administration as Chief of Staff to the Chief Financial Officer and Assistant Secretary of Administration at the U.S. Department of Commerce.
“CC instilled in me a value of life-long learning, the ability to stay curious, and learn new things quickly and with depth.”
Ellie Collinson ’03
“There are things that I was exposed to at CC that I didn’t necessarily expect would show up at this point in my career,” Collinson says. One of those was her block-long study abroad experience in Japan right after 9/11. “It was an eye-opening experience, going to visit Hiroshima Peace Park and learning about the impact of the atomic bomb and, at the same time, people were coming up to me and expressing their sorrow for what happened,” she says. “It was this very timely juxtaposition of history and present, and relationships between people of different countries.”
“It wasn’t necessarily in my mind to do diplomacy,” Collinson says, “I got very involved in political activism as a student, and throughout my career have done different types of political work, but the diplomacy piece of that was anchored for me when I went to Japan in that odd period of time in our history.”
Collinson also remembers listening to former CC President and U.S. Ambassador to India Dick Celeste and his wife Jacqueline talk about their work in India when she was a student. “That was not something at the time that I thought, ‘I really want to do that,’” she says. “Now I’m actually being exposed to several projects with India at USTDA.”
At USTDA, Collinson mainly oversaw internal operations, but was also involved in a sprinkling of external affairs. “I met with the special advisor to the Indonesian president…and I also greeted a delegation from Nepal.” In addition to presenting at U.S. conferences, Collinson represented the USTDA at the White House and in Zambia. “My experience in the classroom at CC helped me be a better communicator and helped me with critical thinking skills in ways that I wasn’t necessarily expecting. Having to defend positions and ideas is obviously a very important part of being a lobbyist and doing any sort of advocacy,” she says.