Where are you currently based and what is your occupation?

I’m currently based in Melbourne and I work as a Junior Product Manager for a FinTech startup called Zepto. It’s heaps of fun, super challenging and an awesome learning opportunity. 

In what year/s did you intern for 40K Globe?

I interned in the June-July cohort of 2018 (one of the last times the program was run!).

Why did you choose to participate in the program?

Great question! I was fresh out of uni and very unsure of what to do with myself. I started looking around for some overseas volunteering opportunities in the hope that I’d get a different experience and find an interesting path. The Globe program popped up in my searches and was exactly what I was looking for, interesting work, trying to solve an interesting problem in an interesting place! I ended up chatting to a friend who had also completed it and spoke very highly of his experiences there, so I applied and the rest is history.

What memories stand out most about your experience as a Globe intern?

I think for everyone that participated in the program, the most pertinent experiences would have been learning about the education challenges of the communities we were working in and how hard and complex they are to solve (we’d been given some project statements that we had to work to solve in our month on the program). This was a lot of people’s first experience of ethnographic research, myself included, and it was really eye-opening speaking to people in those kinds of remote communities. 

Besides that? The food for sure. You can find amazing food in literally any corner of Bangalore. My favourite would have to have been when our Team Lead Simon insisted that we eat curry out of an old shipping container in the middle of nowhere, assuring us we wouldn’t get sick (he was right and it was delicious). 

Did your experience help you in your career? If so, how?

The experience actually helped shape my career! I was hooked, and still am, on the idea that the combination of emerging technology and ethnographic, design style research can be used to help solve complex problems in relatively cheap and simple ways. I came back and ended up working in an amazing software-based graduate program, that has led me to the amazing role that I have today. I’m very grateful to the Globe program for that. 

How has it impacted on your life and outlook in general?

The experience definitely drove home how lucky we are in Australia and has made me incredibly grateful for the education and work opportunities I’ve been given in my life. I definitely did, and still do, take too much of it for granted. 

I’ve also made some awesome friends from the experience that I still catch up with and continue to learn from, for which I’m really grateful for.