Kelly Doley entered UNT and the Honors program with a specific career goal in mind: to work with a nonprofit organization devoted to international development, preferably in Latin America. Almost six years after receiving his bachelor’s degree in international studies and Spanish, Doley has worked in Ethiopia, Guatemala, Kenya, Nicaragua and Sudan.
He has worked for agencies providing volunteer opportunities in Latin America to high school and college students; financial services to the world’s lowest-income entrepreneurs; microcredit and education to Guatemalan women; and humanitarian aid in 30 countries.
Since November 2009, Doley has worked for the U.S. Agency for International Development’s Office of U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance as a senior information officer. In 2010 and 2011, he spent eight months in Khartoum, Sudan, reporting on the humanitarian situation as South Sudan became an independent nation and later focusing on Darfur. He also served for two months last year on USAID’s Disaster Assistance Response Team in Ethiopia.
Doley credits the Honors program faculty for encouraging him to begin working toward his career goal.
“I learned how to get out there and knock on doors,” he says, adding that James Duban, director of UNT’s Office for Nationally Competitive Scholarships, urged Honors students to focus on particular employers for whom they would like to work in the future.
For Doley, the first step was winning a $25,000 Rotary Ambassadorial Scholarship to attend Tec de Monterrey in Mexico his junior year. He studied economic issues in developing nations, in addition to studying Mexican literature and perfecting his Spanish.
“I never would have won the scholarship if Dr. Duban had not patiently coached me through the interview process, preparing me for every question the Rotary panel could ask,” Doley recalls.
After receiving his bachelor’s degree from UNT, Doley was one of a select number of students admitted to Georgetown University’s master’s program in foreign service. He says Duban and Emile Sahliyeh, director of UNT’s international studies program and a Georgetown alumnus, helped him with his application.
While at Georgetown, Doley co-founded Shots of Charity, a nonprofit platform in which customers at the university’s coffee shops donate 25-cent “shots” to a featured charity with each purchase.
Following graduate school, Doley worked as a research assistant for Andrew Natsios, former administrator of USAID and special envoy to Sudan who became a Georgetown faculty member in 2006. Doley and Natsios co-wrote “The Coming Food Coups,” published in the Washington Quarterly in January 2009. Doley also provided research for Natsios’ article “The Clash of the Counter-bureaucracy and Development,” published in July 2010 by the Center for Global Development.
“Georgetown was a challenge for me, but I felt very well prepared when I entered graduate school because of the quality of education I received at UNT and in Honors,” Doley says. “My friends and I pushed each other to do our best.”
