Reflections
As my 9-week internship comes to an end, I am feeling immensely grateful. Sharing a few key learnings:
Non-profit work: This was the first time I worked at a non-profit organization. The team is young (less than a year old), lean, and wildly passionate - which led to quite hectic work schedules. Because the organization is a non-profit, there was also a constant pressure to maintain our funding sources - both by finding new sources and by nurturing existing ones. This involved extensive reporting, pressure to meet targets, and a push to develop more innovative funding structures. This summer made me reflect a lot on what the best way to fund the social sector is - as the current approach is far too taxing on individuals working at recipient organizations.
Education & workforce development: My organization had a lot of conversations about how to scale the work we do. In other words, how do we widen the scope of the impact we create for the ~50 learners that are fortunate enough to be selected for our bootcamp? Do we try to incorporate the curriculum into formal education pathways? Do we try to incorporate the curriculum into employer training? While I don't know the answer to these questions, I'm more and more convinced that education and workforce related requires localized solutions and less emphasis on scalable ones.
Cultural context: Ensuring that you have appropriate cultural context when working abroad or working on projects that affect communities outside your own is a huge challenge but immensely important. This involves cultural humility, asking thoughtful questions, taking extra effort to do research, making sure perspectives of those with lived experiences is included in decision-making processes, and much more. For me, this started with taking Thai lessons - to convey respect for my team and attempt to develop a deeper understand of Thai culture. From there, this involved a lot of trial and error. There were times during my internship that I did culturally insensitive things, but I'm grateful my teammates were willing to provide feedback, which I acted on quickly. It was tempting to start my internship, eager to plug in wherever I could. But I took the first week to watch and learn - which ultimately served me and my team well.
I started my internship hoping to better understand how I wanted to create impact in this world, and to test my hypothesis that workforce development in Southeast Asia could be my path. I remain passionate about the area and am seriously considering moving back to Thailand after graduation, but larger questions still remain! Looking forward to returning to Cambridge to explore them.
