AIESEC

The internship that didn’t exist

I was studying finance and accountancy at the University of Illinois, in the Business Honors Program, one of 40 students picked from about 3,500. After my first year I took an AIESEC internship in Kenya with ASK, a volunteer AIDS-awareness program. I knew I’d probably spend my life in business, so I picked something I’d never get to do otherwise.

On my first morning I caught a matatu across Nairobi to Jamhuri High School and waited two hours to see the deputy principal. He said I could run ASK after school as an extracurricular, and nothing more. The work I’d flown in for mostly wasn’t there. I learned very quickly that I had to be a lot more patient and open to inefficiency.

Form 3, in Kibera

So I went looking. An NGO called The Humanist Centre walked me through Kibera, one of the biggest informal settlements in Africa. At Raila Educational Services, a community school that was badly short of teachers, the principal told me I could start right away. I taught probability in the maths class and the fundamentals of accounting in the business class, to Form 3, the Kenyan equivalent of high school juniors.

Most of the students couldn’t afford books, so I wrote everything on the board and spoke slowly. I stuttered more than usual, and plenty of them found that funny. They were used to copying down whatever the teacher said, so I changed how the class ran: half of it I taught, and half of it they worked problems in small groups while I walked the room, then each group explained its thinking back to me. By exams the other teachers told me the students wouldn’t stop talking about the class. When I missed one day to climb Mt. Kenya, they thought I’d gone for good.

A spreadsheet for Stars for Jesus

Through AIESEC I also found Stars for Jesus, a home in Marurui, on the edge of Nairobi, for boys aged 11 to 18 taken off the streets. I expected to do counseling. Instead I found no records at all: nothing on money coming in or going out, nothing on which boys were there or how they were doing.

I sat down with their paper books and built a set of linked Excel templates, organized by month and day, with summary formulas that did the math for them. The power cut out every time I finished a key part, right as the cursor reached Save, so I learned to save constantly. Then I taught the pastors who ran the home to use it: punch in the numbers and the sheets do the rest. It wasn’t the last accounting system I’d build for someone else.

After school I ran ASK at Jamhuri with another AIESEC intern from Uganda: human development, gender roles, stereotypes and how AIDS spreads. We argued about most of it before every class, which made the classes better.

Mt. Kenya, in running shoes

The first weekend of July I climbed Mt. Kenya with a group of 14. On the final morning the rocks were sheeted in ice under a few inches of snow, and the guide turned the group back. I kept going, in running shoes meant for an indoor track, and stood on the peak alone at sunrise. Standing up there all alone was quite humbling.

By the end of the summer, strangers in Nairobi spoke to me in Swahili. I wrote the whole summer up a few weeks later, from a semester in Singapore. It’s on this site, word for word.

Fifty students onto planes

Back at Illinois I joined AIESEC’s executive board and ran exchanges: finding internships abroad and getting students onto planes. Exchanges went from 5 in a year to 15, and more than 50 Illinois students went abroad while I was there. I spoke at AIESEC conferences around the United States.

I kept going too. In the summer of 2008 I interned with PwC in Muscat, Oman, interviewing executives about how work really moved through their companies and turning it into risk assessments and heat maps for internal audit. There was a semester in Singapore, a Business Honors trip to Brazil and a study abroad in Turkey. An agribusiness course took me to Europe to follow a food supply chain, and I picked cacao. Who would have thought. In my last semester I led a team in the C40 Cities business plan competition in Seoul and built a market and financial model for a green-technology client through Illinois Business Consulting.

I graduated in 2009 with degrees in finance and accountancy and a certificate in international business. The bigger thing I took away: there were more truths out there than the ones I’d been handed, and I started asking what my work, and my life, were for.