Daily Rambles: My summer

A piece of good news and then some ideas I wanted to jot down.

First, the good news, I honored two out of the three quizzes we just got back including a perfect score in Anatomy! Even better news is that the low score was well above passing so I’m stoked! My new study strategy of “study earlier, study more” is really paying off. Hopefully I can keep it up!

In other news, I have just come to realize two things about what I want to do this summer. First, on the profiteering-business-Tuck side of me, I would like to give McKinsey another shot (I tried and failed to get a job there back in Undergrad). The reason and my reservations are pretty simple. The reason: I still dunno what I want to do yet and if it does turn out to be business, McKinsey is THE brand name I can tack on while doing fairly interesting work and inflating my ego and pretending to be important.

The other idea for the summer is to work in some health or service related endeavor. I have been talking for some time about the intersection of microfinance/medicine. The talk today further reinforced to me why these should be mentioned in the same breath. 60% of mortality below age five happens as a result of malnutrition which is directly attributed to the lack of a stable income that reaches the mother. Microfinance has been proven time and again to empower the poorest and most silenced in society, mothers in developing countries by giving them an income and a voice. In addition, the infrastructure used to deliver health care and loans is the same: motor vehicles, community meetings, locally trained “helpers”.

So what to do about this? According to Nils Daulaire, both MFIs and health care NGOs would benefit from a conference to talk about common interests and partnerships. They have every reason to work together, no counter reasons (no funding conflicts) and simply have not done so. This potentially could be an exciting and very productive discussion. One particular firm seems to have gotten the equation right and I think would really benefit from the discussion. Brac in Bangladesh does health care and microfinance and really listens and serves the “comprehensive” needs of the people they help. How great would it be to get people together for such a conference? This is definitely worth exploring further.

So to get back on topic, my summer, perhaps it would be good to work for an MFI like BRAC (unfortunately I don’t speak Bengali) and learn about all of this. That would certainly be something worth working on. However, as usual I always try to balance everything. I want to be able to see/learn something new, resume build, travel, relax, visit family. So what I would really like to do is work in China, preferably in Shanghai. One topic for doing that is to finance myself through Dartmouth and do a health needs assessment of migrant “silenced” population of Shanghai, the migrant workers and ask the question: what are their health and economic needs? One thing I will definitely need to keep in mind. Nils reminded me today that as western health care workers, we go to a needy place but we inevitably leave, the real people who impact life for the poor are those who are from the area and GO BACK. Perhaps that is why I want to return to Shanghai someday and help those people because that is where I envision my life to be ultimately.

Anyway, enough for the philosophizing and daydreams, back to the library!

A couple of great websites that are worthy of exploration and future reference:

http://www.brac.net/index2.htm

http://www.globalhealth.org/

PS Duke UNC tonight, GO DUKE GO!!!