Young Alumni Award: Katie Malague '94
The Bucknell Young Alumni Award was created to highlight a young alumnus who has found a way to combine professional accomplishment, work to benefit society, and service to alma mater early in his/her career. Katie Malague, Class of 1994, has truly excelled in all of these areas.
While a student, Katie majored in education and history, expecting to become a history teacher. On campus, she was involved in numerous extracurricular activities – including College Democrats and Catholic Campus Ministry. After graduation, while looking for her first job in Washington, DC, she ended up with two unexpected positions. She went to work for U.S. Senator Frank Lautenberg (from her home state of New Jersey) and also served as a youth minister at a local Catholic church, thanks to her connection to a former chaplain at Bucknell.
After three years in Washington, Katie returned to school and earned a Masters in educational policy from Harvard. She then joined Andersen Consulting (which later became Accenture) as a consultant, first with the state and local government practice in Boston and later with the federal government division in Washington, DC. But politics beckoned, and she left Washington again and moved to Iowa to manage regional field operations for Governor Howard Dean’s presidential campaign. Her political activities then drew her to the nonprofit sector.
Today, Katie is a senior program manager for the Partnership for Public Service, a nonpartisan nonprofit organization that works to revitalize our federal government by inspiring a new generation to serve and by transforming the way government works. Katie is the coordinator of the Presidential Management Initiative, focusing on federal government reform and management priorities for the administration and Congress. She even served on the Obama-Biden Transition Project, providing the incoming administration with the information necessary to make strategic policy, budgetary, and personnel decisions prior to the inauguration.
Katie’s Bucknell involvement is equally impressive. She attended her first club event shortly after arriving in Washington and soon began helping to strategize and plan club events. When she moved to Boston, she became the president of the Boston club; after she moved back to DC, she became president of the DC club. She served as co-chair of the Council of Club Presidents for several years. In 2006, Katie joined the Bucknell Alumni Association Board of Directors, where she currently serves as chair of the Clubs and Young Alumni Committee. The committee works to reconnect alumni, especially those within 15 years of graduation, with the university. Her goal is to bring a little bit of Lewisburg to alumni who may not often get back to campus.
Katie has assisted the Career Development Center as an organizer of the Bucknellians in Government event in Washington and is always willing to host students for job and networking fairs. She was also a presenter at the Student Leadership Conference on campus in 2007 and currently serves as a writing tutor for an incoming Bucknell student from Washington, DC, through the Posse Foundation.
As one of Katie’s nominators wrote, “She really is a remarkable leader and volunteer for Bucknell – an example for young and old, and a friend to many of us. Even as an undergraduate, Katie was a leader, but her extraordinary service to Bucknell in such a short time is to be celebrated.”
For her extraordinary commitment to Bucknell and her dedication to public service, it is with great pleasure that the Bucknell Alumni Association honors Katie Malague with its Young Alumni Award.
