P. Kenzie Bok

Working at the White House this summer, Marshall Scholar P. Kenzie Bok ’11 was busy reading letters from America. It was yet another reinforcement of her strong belief in bringing people and policy together. “In politics, as elsewhere, you have to think about people as people,” she explains. “You really have to think about people as ends in themselves.”

As the student president of the Institute of Politics (IOP), she works to organize people as tools for public change. “We don’t want people who are thinking about politics as a power game for a ruling class,” she says. “We want people to be asking, ‘what are the solutions to the problems that we see around us?’”

Before leading the IOP, Bok served as chair of its Fellows program, which brings in important politicians and policy experts to lead study groups and mentor students at the Institute for a semester. “There are as many paths as people to a career in public service,” she says. “The fellows help students envision what they could end up doing, potential paths they could take.”

As a Peer Advising Fellow, Bok continues to connect people to resources that help them find their calling. According to proctor Sarah Wagner-McCoy, “She is great on giving advice to people and helping to plug them into different activities on campus.”

Jenny Ye ’13, a former advisee of Bok’s, agrees. “She is very interested in getting people excited about public service, even people who are not government concentrators,” she says.

As for Bok’s own path, next year she will study intellectual history and theology at Cambridge University. But studying the history of people as thinkers and the changes they effect will be nothing new for Bok—just people politics as usual.