What does it take to respond to a crisis? UNO grad Mark Schaffer spent his senior year at OPPD learning just that.
by BELLA LOCKWOOD-WATSON
UNO Communications Specialist
Tornadoes tear through towns. Floodwaters swallow roads. Wildfires ignite with little warning. In the United States, natural disasters cause more than $18 billion in damage each year. But after the sirens fade and the skies clear, who steps in to restore order?
At the University of Nebraska at Omaha, students like Mark Schaffer are answering that call.
As an emergency management major, Schaffer didn’t just study disasters from a distance. He immersed himself in real-time response planning through a hands-on internship with the Omaha Public Power District.
Schaffer has long been drawn to the intersection of strategic thinking, logistics and community engagement, but it took time to find the right fit. He began his college career studying mechanical engineering, intrigued by the idea of building systems and solving problems. After completing an internship in the field, however, he realized his strengths lay elsewhere.
Wanting to make a more direct impact on people and communities, he enrolled at UNO and shifted his focus to emergency management — a discipline that blended his analytical mindset with a drive to serve others in moments that matter most.
UNO’s College of Public Affairs and Community Service equipped Schaffer with the vocabulary, frameworks and critical thinking tools to understand what makes communities resilient. He studied everything from disaster recovery protocols to the intricacies of incident command systems. But it wasn’t until he stepped into the halls of OPPD that those ideas took on real weight. There, the theories became tangible — and the stakes more immediate.
At OPPD, Schaffer became a dynamic part of the emergency management team. One week, he might be stationed in the Emergency Operations Center, watching teams mobilize during a weather event. Next, he was helping craft tabletop exercises involving complex what-if scenarios: active threats, natural disasters and large-scale infrastructure failure.
These weren’t academic thought experiments. They were critical tests of how OPPD, as a major utility provider, would keep Omaha’s lights on in a worst-case scenario.
“I’ve been able to really get a good idea of all the stages of emergency management and gotten to see it all,” Schaffer said.
He quickly found a passion for the adrenaline and unpredictability of disaster response — especially when it came to natural hazards. Tornadoes, floods, extreme weather events. These weren’t abstract threats to him. They were puzzles to solve in real time.
“Just being able to understand what any of that actually means has been super valuable,” he said. “Both for the learning process — because then you don’t have to stop and have people define things — but also for the connection-building part.”
When Schaffer entered the room with veteran emergency managers and utility leads, he wasn’t just a student sitting in the corner. He understood the acronyms, spoke the jargon and tracked the flow of decisions with confidence. That kind of fluency earned him credibility — and made him feel like he belonged.
As his May 2025 graduation fades into the rearview and the real world calls louder, one thing’s certain: Schaffer isn’t waiting to make a difference. He’s already doing it.
