In this article our young volunteer Tanya presents us her path of excellence between India, London, Uganda up to Naples to support our activities through the International Volunteers program.
“My name is Tanya Singh. I grew up in India and moved to London in 2013 to start university. Before arriving in London, I worked as a part-time teacher for the Uday Foundation, an NGO based in New Delhi, in India. My main job was to teach English and math to young and old, who were illiterate at the time. It was there that I met Mr. Siddhartha Khanna, a financial investor from Mumbai, India. one of his trainees during the summer of 2011 and 2012 and he recommended me to choose the faculty of Economics.
So in 2013, I moved to London to study Economics at Queen Mary University. During that time I worked as a research assistant to Dr. Thomai Filippeli, associate professor of Macroeconomics and International Economics at my university. His research focused on concentrating on uncertainty shocks in the global economy and their impact on the economies of Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and New Zealand.
This was a really interesting three-month experience for me because not only did I learn data analysis but it is what prompted me to specialize in Development Economics, in fact after finishing my Bachelor in 2016, I I moved to University College London to study Development Economics.
The path of my specialist degree has helped me develop research skills and given the opportunity to go to Kampala (Uganda) for a research project.
I was appointed Project Manager for my six-person team. We worked with the Community Development Resource Network (CDRN), a Kampala-based non-governmental organization to study participatory techniques as a means of resolving community conflicts related to land issues. Due to the ambiguous property laws in the country, conflicts in the Masaka region (southwest of Kampala) are very common. The idea of our project was to study participatory techniques practiced by CDRN to resolve conflicts. In addition to promoting formal recognition of land ownership among community members and Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) strategies, we have been able to provide some recommendations to the NGO on how conflicts can be avoided in the first place.
After returning to London, I did an internship at Y-Care International, an NGO of the YMCA movement in the United Kingdom and Ireland, based in London. I studied how credit schemes can be made accessible to vulnerable young people in rural Liberia and I presented this research as a thesis for my Master’s degree. This research is expected to be published in February 2018.
Before starting my PhD in October 2018 I wanted to take a break from studying. Although the idea of resting was tempting, I didn’t succeed and decided to do something productive. The Dialogue Place International Volunteers program, recommended by a friend, seemed to me a great thing as it not only allows me to travel in this beautiful country, but also allows me to make a small contribution to the important activity that Dialogue Place is carrying out .
After finishing this program, I will go to London in March for an internship at a political consultancy firm called Thorncliffe. In June I will take the exam to obtain the Investment Operations Certificate (IOC) to start working in the financial sector during my doctorate. And if all goes well, in the future I will work to continue Dialogue Place’s commitment to social enterprises because I think it is imperative that these initiatives expand not only in the EU but also outside. ”