Maaz Rehan’s Presidential Co-op

Many Drexel students have landed great co-ops that provide ample bragging rights. Mohammad “Maaz” Rehan may have most of them beat: He recently completed a co-op at the White House.

Specifically, Maaz worked within the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP), one of the Executive Offices of the President, on a team that manages $31.1 billion of the president’s drug budget.

“I was privileged in this case. Because I came here on a six-month co-op, as opposed to the typical three-month White House internship, I was asked to take on a full-time staffer’s portfolio,” he explains. “I was not doing typical intern work.”

Maaz was responsible for assisting in the analysis of spending proposals on behalf of the ONDCP, to make sure they align with President Barack Obama’s strategy for drug control. He interacted heavily with five federal agencies’ drug budgets, working with several departments’ Office of the Chief Financial Officer.

He worked with the State Department’s United States Agency for International Development and Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement. Within the Department of Defense, he worked with the Drug Interdiction and Counterdrug Activities and Defense Health Program. Within the Department of Homeland Security, he worked with Custom Border Protection, the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the United States Coast Guard.

“What’s most important is the experience that you are getting, the people you are meeting, your daily tasks and your self-growth.”

His supervisors trained him on what to pay attention to. “They know these accounts and trained me on what to flag,” he says.

He was also assigned with tracking how money was spent – as well as how effectively it was spent working on both the fiscal year 2016 and 2017 budgets, which are currently released on whitehouse.gov. “Our data team was collecting intelligence, so we could analyze it. That way we could see if the agencies’ performance matched up with what they were reporting.”

He says he learned a lot about databases during this co-op experience. “And the Excel skills that I learned at Drexel, specifically in classes such as analytics and statistics, were key. I was able to do these big time equations and queries.”

Maaz says that business students are not typically taught what a government budget looks like or how it works, so the co-op was a fairly novel experience for him where he had to learn most of what he was doing along the way.

He had the opportunity to meet and chat briefly with President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama.

“Meeting them was unbelievable,” he says. “They are as genuine and beautiful in person as they are on-screen and very humble people. When they arrived in the room, they brought an immense amount of energy with them – their force of presence is incredible. People were just ecstatic with joy. The Obamas’ humor influenced that.”

Maaz boasts about the “cool perks” he got to experience that were unique to working for the White House, like access to the White House bowling alley (first created as a birthday gift for President Truman in 1947), which he was able to reserve to hang out with friends. He was even invited to attend the big White House holiday reception as his director’s guest. “Not a lot of interns get that opportunity, so hard work does pay off,” he says.

Maaz transferred to Drexel as a sophomore and was determined to try to land a co-op at the White House from the get-go. Not only because it was the White House, but also because of his previous work for drug prevention in his earlier years, influenced by his religious faith and personal experiences. He heard about the ONDCP opportunity through a connection he had made during his high school participation on the national Student Leadership Council of Students Against Destructive Decisions (SADD), the largest nonprofit peer-to-peer organization in the nation. This contact mentored him through the process of interviewing for and landing his co-op position.

Maaz is a self-described go-getter. “I’m always striving for more. I look to accomplish tasks outside of my job description, volunteering for things that I don’t have to do,” he says. “A lot of my friends don’t think it’s necessary to ask to see what else they can do or try to spread out past what their job description says. But in doing so, I’ve learned so much, met so many great people and had so many great opportunities, just because I put myself out there.”

In fact, he volunteered to serve on the ONDCP’s event planning committee, which led to his being nominated to serve as the emcee for the agency’s holiday party, held at the Executive Office of the President. “At the end of the party, the agency’s director, Michael Botticelli, called me out to thank me for my participation.”

Maaz, a finance and business analytics major, has co-op advice for other Drexel students: What’s important is “not so much how much you are getting paid or the name of the company you work at. What’s most important is the experience that you are getting, the people you are meeting, your daily tasks and your self-growth.”

As for future aspirations, he’s open-minded. “I sought out this opportunity to gain some perspective pertaining to public vs. private sector.” Career-wise, he’s open to either, but one thing he does know for sure is that he wants to earn a graduate degree, probably in business, at some point after graduation.

Maaz Rehan expects to earn his degree from LeBow College of Business in December 2016.

*Photography by Tamzin B. Smith *