In the summer of 2010 I was fortunate enough to receive a Goldman Fellowship to support my internship at the regional non-profit Focus St. Louis. My experience working on their Policy and Community Engagement team was one of my first opportunities to gain professional exposure to the world of economic and social development. In my role there I got to see the importance of bringing together leaders from different sectors while learning professional skills such as how to write policy research papers, organize government forums, and develop local outreach initiatives.
As most non-profit internships are unpaid given the already scarce resources in the sector, receiving funding support as a Goldman Fellow made this internship both a viable work opportunity for me as well as a chance to contribute to the St. Louis community that I had become a part of during my time at WashU.
After graduating in 2011, my career has neither kept me in the St. Louis region nor in the non-profit sector. I have since gone on to work for multilateral agencies such as the World Bank and the United Nations on issues of poverty, inequality, and effective governance in Eastern Europe and Central Asia as well as in Latin America and the Caribbean.
I am now currently back in higher education pursuing my doctorate degree in International Development at the University of Oxford. However, while the specific locations and sector of my career may have changed, my commitment to advancing economic and social development outcomes has remained steady—and it was through the Goldman Fellows Program that I first had the opportunity to see what a job in this field actually looked like in practice while gaining early work experience and learning what relevant skills I would need to build going forward.