Miles Pinsof-Berlowitz ’27

As Miles Pinsof-Berlowitz ’27 wrapped up his first semester at Wesleyan, he had a plan: he would major in the College of Social Studies and follow the multidisciplinary major toward his future goals in politics.

But things didn’t quite work out as he’d hoped.

Pinsof-Berlowitz was waitlisted for the program and had to reevaluate his next steps. By the time he was admitted that summer, he’d already committed to working on a campaign for a United States House of Representatives candidate and had decided to take the fall semester off to take on a leadership role in the campaign’s organizing team. He knew that to reach his goals he had to be willing to adapt, pivot, and take advantage of the opportunities available to him—even if that meant taking a temporary break from his studies.

Fortunately for Pinsof-Berlowitz, at Wesleyan, learning isn’t confined to campus. “Having the option to do that and being able to go out into the world was astounding,” he says, adding that everyone from his professors and advisors to University President Michael S. Roth ’78 had encouraged him to follow his passions.

Pinsof-Berlowitz spent this past summer working in politics as well—this time on a campaign for the US Senate in the lead-up to the midterm elections. Now back on campus for his final year, he continues to bring his belief that society should be more equitable to the classroom and his extracurricular activities. Pinsof-Berlowitz, who eventually chose to major in government with a focus on comparative politics, co-founded the Wesleyan Institute for Policy (WIP), an undergraduate-run faculty-advised public policy think tank that works with local and state-level stakeholders to drive change in Middletown.

Pinsof-Berlowitz says he is “deeply grateful” for his mentor, Professor Mary Alice Haddad, who also served as a founding faculty advisor for WIP. He served as a teaching assistant for her course on Introduction to Effective Local Political Action, and she guided him in his role as editor in chief for the Wesleyan Argus, including in publishing a series, with co-editor Thomas Lyons ’26, called “Letters on Pragmatic Hope,” in which Wesleyan professors, administrators, and staff reflected on how students should respond in an increasingly authoritarian era in the United States.

“We were hoping to share, at the very least, a few rays of (pragmatic) hope to students who felt our political system was too far gone to make it worth a fight—something I heard all too often last year,” he says. “At best, the series was a playbook for the ongoing fight. We tried to craft it in the Wesleyan way, and I think it shows up as a strong representation of our campus.”

Pinsof-Berlowitz says Wesleyan has helped prepare him for a career in politics in part because its small size allows students to run with their ideas as far as they can take them. Wesleyan, he says, “taught me a lot of organizational and administrative nuances that I think are incredibly applicable to the world of politics and forced me to think a lot about the long-term plans, and challenges, of my organizations. That will carry me far.”