Introduction

Hello! This summer I'm interning at an education non-profit in Bangkok, Thailand. The non-profit is dedicated to decreasing unemployment, by transforming education to employment pathways. The organization designs and delivers training programs that equip youth with the skills necessary to gain meaningful employment.

This internship represents the next step in a journey of many years. I am passionate about workforce development as a means of creating equity worldwide, especially for women. This passion crystalized when working as a management consultant at McKinsey, which is why I joined McKinsey’s workforce development department. In 2019, I moved to Zambia to apply what I had learned at McKinsey in a low income country. My work at Yalelo, Africa’s largest fish producer, focused on building initiatives to help the company better invest in and harness its 1,000 person workforce. This experience led me to apply to HKS, since I understood the need for public and social sector engagement to enable effective workforce development. I hope that my internship will complement my previous experiences by giving me exposure to the non-profit world and allow me to learn from an established workforce development organization. On top of that, I learned about this non-profit four years ago, so interning for them truly feels like a full-circle moment.

I am incredibly excited by the prospect of gaining work experience in Thailand, a country I have visited once, but have never lived or worked in. I’ve had the good fortune of living and working in Zambia and Brazil, so I know firsthand the power of cross-cultural engagement, dialogue, and learning.

Here are some pictures from my first week in Bangkok!