The People Who Shaped Them

For Taylor, that journey began with a campus job in the Maxwell School Dean’s Office.

Working alongside Dean David M. Van Slyke exposed her to new research opportunities, faculty mentors and policy questions. As she considered medical, law and graduate school, Van Slyke encouraged her to look beyond the paths she had envisioned.

“He opened my eyes to what I could do beyond what I was pursuing,” Taylor says. “He told me the M.P.A. is a great way to kind of figure out what you like, because once you go into the public sector, you can do so many different things.”

Van Slyke says he told Taylor early on that if she wasn’t going to study a Maxwell major, he “didn’t know why we were employing her.”

“She thought I was joking—I wasn’t,” he adds. “That became the pattern with Taylor, Sydney and Lauren: figure out what they cared about, then show them the full range of what Maxwell could offer. What made it easy was who they are: humble, curious, appreciative, always willing to listen and asking good questions.”

For Taylor, research projects for Van Slyke led to a graduate assistantship with former Secretary of the Navy and NASA Administrator Sean O’Keefe ’78 M.P.A., cementing her interest in governance and national security. “Working with the two of them is where I found my love for policy research,” she says.

Although Sydney had decided to pursue the M.P.A. before Taylor enrolled, she also found herself working alongside O’Keefe—first conducting undergraduate research, then serving as his graduate assistant.

“He brought us into everything,” she says of O’Keefe, University Professor Emeritus and University trustee. “We were always the youngest people in a room full of people who had been in government or highly ranked admirals.”

“The Grosso sisters are mature well beyond their years, enthusiastically dive into anything they’re asked to do, energize those around them, and as a bonus, are great fun to be with,” says O’Keefe. “Their parents raised three remarkable women who are the Maxwell vision of model citizens.”

Through O’Keefe, Sydney found herself in conversations with senior military leaders and astronauts, learning firsthand how policy decisions are made.

“They’re the kinds of experiences you just don’t expect to have,” says Sydney ’23 B.A. (PSt)/’24 M.P.A.

Although Taylor and Sydney insist they didn’t pressure Lauren to follow them into the M.P.A. program, she chose Maxwell for graduate school over a master’s program in data analytics. “Between the reputation of the degree and the people that I was surrounded by, Maxwell felt more like a family than just a school,” Lauren says.

“I got to see how much the faculty and the deans care about the students,” Lauren says. “I could see how much they genuinely want us to succeed.”

With Lauren’s graduation, Van Slyke says this is the first time since he became dean that there isn’t a Grosso in the dean’s office. “We’ll notice their absence,” he says. “I know they’ll all make important contributions and I’m grateful for the engaged citizen leaders they’ll become.”

‘More Than We Could Have Imagined’

Despite their shared connections, each sister forged her own path through Maxwell, rarely overlapping in classes or building the same networks. But they had an unusual advantage: an older sister who had navigated the same hallways—someone to call about which professors to seek out, how to approach a capstone or reassurance during a hard semester.

“It’s a really cool connection,” Taylor says. “We’ve always been very close, but having this shared experience has brought us even closer.”

Those experiences helped launch three distinct careers.

Today, Taylor works at Guidehouse, shaping information technology governance for the Department of the Air Force—a role that traces to governance research from her Maxwell capstone.

Sydney is a research associate at the Institute for Defense Analyses in Alexandria, Virginia, contributing to projects on military readiness and organizational effectiveness, applying skills she honed at Maxwell.

Lauren completed her degree this summer with a certificate of advanced study in data analytics for public policy and is pursuing roles that turn complex data into recommendations for better organizational decisions.

Graduation didn’t mark the end of their Maxwell experience.

Taylor still reaches out to Van Slyke and O’Keefe for advice. Sydney returns whenever the Institute for Defense Analyses hosts Maxwell capstone teams, and Murrett never misses a chance to introduce her as a Maxwell alumna.

Sydney often brings jars from the family’s beehives when she visits Maxwell—and once surprised Murrett with a whole chicken the family had raised. “I think he was a little surprised,” she laughs. More seriously, “we hold Maxwell in the highest esteem because it’s brought us more than we could have imagined and given us opportunities that we could have never received anywhere else,” she says.

The sisters still compare notes about professors, careers and lessons learned, remaining one another’s sounding board just as they were in graduate school.

That bond was on full display this past May, at Lauren’s graduate Convocation. Amid the crowds and cameras, her father sought out Murrett—not for a photo with his daughter, but for a handshake of his own. He thanked him, one Grosso sister at a time, for a decade of mentorship the family hadn’t expected when Taylor first walked into the dean’s office. Then he asked if they could get a picture together.

“We’re not just sisters,” Lauren says. “Maxwell made us family in a different way, too.”