“Everything I do in my job rises from the first-rate instruction I received in AAPS,” says Jensen, who graduated from Pioneer High School in 2002.
Where does an AAPS education actually lead? Our new series, “Where are they now?” follows district graduates into the work and paths their time here shaped. This week we talk to Tom Jensen, graduate of Burns Park Elementary (1995); Tappan Middle School (1998) and Pioneer High School (2002), Director of Public Policy Polling in Raleigh, N.C.
Where did your career path take you after graduating, and what first drew you to your current field?
I went to the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill after graduating from Pioneer and spent my first year after college organizing for the Sierra Club.
I’ve always been very interested in politics and elections and also very interested in statistics, and polling represents a perfect nexus of those things, so when the opportunity to work at PPP arose in 2007, I took it, and I’ve been there ever since!
Polling is partly about finding out who’s winning and losing but it’s also about helping political candidates and organizations find a path to victory, and I’m proud that we’ve been able to play a role in so many things across the country- in 2024 we had the second most federal clients of any Democratic polling company and I’m hoping that in 2026 we’ll be Number One on that front!
Is there a teacher, class, or moment from your time in the district that still shapes how you approach your work today?
I was in Don Packard’s class for 3.5 out of my 4 years at Pioneer, mostly working on the student newspaper, the Optimist. Don trusted my peers and me to put the paper out every two weeks without much hand-holding from him. When I became the head of PPP at 24, the owner of the company similarly trusted me to figure out for myself how to make it thrive, and that wasn’t intimidating for me because I’d already been in a similar situation in high school. In some ways, those years with him and the paper were my MBA!
What does a typical day in your current role look like?
My job is very interdisciplinary. The most important part of being a pollster is getting the numbers right, which involves doing a lot of statistics. People ask me about my math background, and the truth is, I never took a math class after AAPS! I’m very grateful to my math teachers for setting me up so well to make a living doing math.
Another big part of my daily work is interpreting the numbers for clients, writing memos, and explaining what we found in their polls and how they should act on it. It’s not unusual for me to write 1,000 or 2,000 words a day, and that’s something I pretty much completely learned in AAPS too; I had great instruction in learning how to write all the way through. Thank you, English teachers!
And obviously my work requires having a pretty deep knowledge of what’s going on with politics and elections both in Washington and all 50 states. I learned a lot of those nuts and bolts from the outstanding Social Studies instruction I received throughout my K-12 experience, and maybe more importantly, those teachers encouraged my passion to go out and learn more on my own.
One of my biggest clients is the machinery devoted to getting Democrats control of the US Senate, and the first time I ever knew all there was to know about Senate elections in the country was an independent study I did on them my senior year at Pioneer!
Everything I do in my job rises from the first-rate instruction I received in AAPS.
What’s one piece of advice you’d offer to a current student who’s interested in following a similar path?
My biggest piece of advice to students is just to be willing to take risks, especially early in their careers when they have plenty of time to choose a different path if something doesn’t work out. I’ve had a much more enjoyable experience going to a small company no one had heard of and growing its revenues 100x than I would have had going to a safer, lower-level job at a more well-established company.
And you have to be willing to take some risk within the job too. PPP first got on the map in 2008 when most polls had the South Carolina primary close, and we said Barack Obama was up by a landslide margin. People said, ‘What on earth is Public Policy Polling?’ After Obama did win by a landslide margin that fueled his path to the Democratic nomination, people knew who we were.
And you have to keep doing that. Last year there were 33 polls of the primary for New York City Mayor, and 32 of them had Zohran Mamdani behind. We put out the only poll that had him finishing in first place and proved right. It was a risk to be out in public as such an outlier, but you just have to trust in your work and have faith that if you’re doing things right most of the time it will work out for you. That’s true in all jobs.
How, if at all, do you stay connected to AAPS?
I am blessed to still be friends with many of my teachers decades after I was in their class!
Last year I ran the Burns Park Run 10k with my 1st Grade teacher Mrs. Reid, and I go up north to visit our librarian Mrs. Harvey in Petoskey every summer. I’ve gone to Tigers games this year with my math teachers from 8th, 10th, and 11th grades. I go walking all the time with my middle school Latin teacher, Mrs. Pedley, who I have trouble keeping pace with!
And I have breakfasts, lunches, and coffees with a variety of other teachers. I’m very grateful for how wonderful all my teachers were to me when I was in their classes, and for many years beyond! I encourage everyone to contact a teacher from their youth today and let them know how much they meant to them- those relationships are a wonderful two-way street for both parties.
One of my first political gigs was being heavily involved in the 2004 bond campaign that resulted in the building of Skyline and upgraded facilities throughout the district. I appreciate that Ann Arbor voters continue to support the schools and hope that every student can have as good of an experience growing up in the district as I did!
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