Student Perspectives: What Interning at New York City's Budget Watchdog Taught Me About Policy, Data, and Playing the Long Game

Maham Hassan (MS Statistics '26)

If you've never heard of the New York City Independent Budget Office, you're not alone. Most people outside of city government haven't. The IBO is a nonpartisan city agency whose job is to provide independent fiscal and policy analysis on the New York City budget. Think of it as a check on the Mayor's budget office, an independent voice that tells the City Council and the public what things actually cost, without a political agenda attached.

I spend my days reading the news, tracking policy proposals, attending City Council hearings, and contributing to research reports. Right now, my primary project has been helping build IBO's cost estimate for making all New York City buses fare-free, a major proposal championed by newly elected Mayor Mamdani. That means reading academic literature on fare elasticity, analyzing MTA ridership data, drafting sections of the report, and building R models that compare ridership responses across neighborhoods with different income levels. My next project will look at vacancies in NYCHA public housing.

The most important thing I've learned

Policy research is slower and more careful than it looks from the outside, and that's a feature, not a bug.

When you're building a cost estimate that will be used by City Council members to vote on a billion dollar budget item, every assumption has to be defensible. Early on, I wanted to move fast. I had the MTA pilot data, I had the ridership numbers, and I thought the answer was obvious. But the more I dug in, the more I realized how many things could bias the estimate.

The fact that the pilot routes were in low-income neighborhoods where riders are more price-sensitive, the fact that pre-existing fare evasion was nearly 47% on those routes, the fact that the city was still recovering from COVID and ridership was growing systemwide regardless. Each of those things changed the picture.

What I've learned is that the most important skill in policy research isn't knowing the answer. It's knowing what the limitations of your data are, being honest about them, and building an analysis that is transparent about uncertainty rather than hiding it.

How I approached networking

I cold-called IBO in 2021 when I knew I really wanted to work in policy and something that helped NYC. Nothing came of it then, but I kept in contact. At the time, they only accepted graduate students as interns. Years later, when I was ready for a graduate internship, I reached back out to the same person. Before I was hired, I did four coffee chats with IBO employees, who ended up vouching for me to the team. That's the reason I'm here.

The most memorable networking moment of this experience happened at a City Council hearing, where I struck up a conversation with a researcher from the Center for Urban Future after the session ended. I love City Council hearings because you can meet people from all across city government, keep up to date with policy agendas in real time, and anyone from the public is welcome. We ended up talking about a report of his that stuck with me: entry-level jobs in New York City have declined 34% since before COVID. For someone at the beginning of their career, trying to break into a field where those jobs are scarce, that number was concerning. It also reminded me why the work IBO does matters. Understanding the fiscal landscape of the city is inseparable from understanding the conditions that shape everyone's opportunities in it.

My biggest contribution

The fare-free bus report is the most substantial thing I've worked on. Beyond the research itself, I think my biggest contribution has been taking on the parts of the analysis that required connecting academic literature to real-world data. Reading papers on fare elasticity from Mexico City, London, and Boston, and then asking whether those estimates were actually applicable to New York City, and why or why not. That kind of critical translation between what the research says and what the data actually shows is something I've worked hard at, and I think it's made the report more honest about what we know and what we don't. It can be hard not to have biases, especially when you feel passionately about any given policy, but my work at IBO has solidified the importance of impartiality.

What I want to learn next

My next project at IBO is on NYCHA vacancies. Thousands of public housing units sit empty while hundreds of thousands of families wait on the housing list. I'm excited about it because it combines the quantitative side of budget analysis with questions that have real consequences for real people.

More broadly, this experience has made me want to go deeper into urban policy and fiscal analysis. I want to get better at the data side, stronger in R, more comfortable with large administrative datasets, and I want to keep getting closer to the places where policy decisions actually get made.

For students who are struggling to find an internship

Find someone at an organization you're genuinely interested in, send a short email, and ask for twenty minutes of their time. Be genuinely curious about their work during the coffee chat.

And play the long game. I first reached out to IBO in 2021 and got nothing. I came back four years later and it worked. The contact I kept, the coffee chats I did, the time I spent learning about the work, all of it added up. Persistence and curiosity will open more doors than a perfect resume.