Month: September 2017

This is the next in a series of posts by recipients of the Career Services Summer Funding Grant. We’ve asked funding recipients to reflect on their summer experiences and talk about the industries in which they’ve been spending their summer. You can read the entire series here.

This entry is by Bryan Mena-Martinez, WH ’18

I’ve always been interested in applying the skills that I’ve learned in Wharton into giving back to my local community, but I’ve never fully understood the best to do so until I took my Nonprofit Sector class under Ashley Swanson. Over the course of semester, the class showed me how much of an impact charitable organizations could have on their local communities, and this inspired me to pursue a summer opportunity with Federacion Duranguense USA’s Plaza Comunitaria Casa Durango.

The general mission of Casa Durango is to help first-generation immigrants succeed in the United States. The immigrants the organization serve often do not have the connections or education to equip them to succeed in the United States. Casa Durango is located in Huntington Park, California, United States less than 5 miles from where I grew up. The neighborhood is made up of over 95% Hispanics/Latinos, many of whom are first-generation immigrants. Casa Durango is concerned specifically with classes that target the following areas: literacy, elementary school, middle school, the GED, computer skills, English, and preparation for the US Citizenship Naturalization Test. These classes were chosen because they have a large amount of relevance specifically for the target demographic of first-generation immigrant.

While I was in Casa Durango, I tried to apply the skills that I learned from Wharton to try and optimize and streamline the operations. There were many challenges that non-profits faced that seemed simple – for instance, one of the classes I taught didn’t have enough markers, which meant that I had to bring markers from home. But I realized that simply bringing all of the markers myself wasn’t sustainable, and that I could tackle this problem with the skills that I learned from Wharton on a systems-level basis, and I started thinking of ways to solve all these practical problems that I never realized non-profits faced.

After graduation, I hope to apply the knowledge and business acumen I have acquired throughout my experiences and my time at Wharton to provide meaningful resources to low-income students and immigrants so that they may contribute to their families and communities. By understanding the entire system of how organizations work – from the financial side to the operations side – I can better solve the practical problems that non-profits face and. I am grateful for the funding that allowed me to hone in on my passion and for allowing me to discover how to apply my education to positively impact my community in the future.

This is the next in a series of posts by recipients of the Career Services Summer Funding Grant. We’ve asked funding recipients to reflect on their summer experiences and talk about the industries in which they’ve been spending their summer. You can read the entire series here.

This entry is by Angela Y. Ra, COL WH ’18

As a student in Wharton, I have seen the vast majority of my friends go into the finance industry, working atrociously long hours at investment banks, private equity firms, and hedge funds. But I always saw a different use for my finance and accounting coursework – in the public service upholding the integrity of the markets in which those investment activities take place. After interning for the Securities and Exchange Commission and experiencing the civil side of securities regulation, I was incredibly excited to learn about the criminal side of securities fraud at the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York. This federal prosecutor’s office is renowned for pursuing many complex white-collar crimes due to its jurisdiction over Manhattan, the financial center of the country.

The Criminal Division of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District houses many units that investigate cases in fields such as terrorism, narcotics, cybercrime, and public corruption. However, I was assigned to the Securities & Commodities Fraud unit, which is responsible for prosecuting crimes relating to the operation of the country’s securities and commodities market, including all varieties of securities fraud, insider trading, market manipulation schemes, and accounting and regulatory reporting frauds. During my ten weeks in the office, I was able to experience the various stages of a case – from the early inceptions of an investigation to the frenzy of trial prep to the solemnity of sentencing in convicted cases.

On a day to day basis, my work varied based on the needs of the paralegals and the Assistant U.S. Attorneys. A small sample of the tasks that I was responsible for include: cutting and serving subpoenas, logging and indexing discovery and trial materials, analyzing evidence, transcribing calls, and assisting trial teams in preparation for trial. I came to appreciate the detail-oriented nature of the work and how a minute piece of testimony could be pivotal in a case. Furthermore, I learned about how a case moves through the criminal justice system, especially with regards to the unique role that prosecutors have in seeking the truth while also upholding the rights of the defendants through ethical prosecutorial conduct.

However, the most inspiring and informative part of my internship was having the opportunity to observe the Assistant U.S. Attorneys in venues such as trial proceedings and moot opening and closing statements. Besides the caliber of the attorneys being unparalleled, it was incredibly constructive for solidifying my own aspirations of working as an attorney in the public service to see the best federal prosecutors in the country in action. The interns were also afforded another important learning opportunity through a plethora of brown bag lunch sessions, in which we heard directly from the Acting U.S. Attorney for the Southern District, Joon Kim, as well as distinguished judges, defense attorneys, and criminal investigators. This insight and advice from the diverse facets of the law enforcement system and from both sides of the bench gave me perspective on how to plan and navigate my own career path.

I would not have wanted to spend my summer in any other way or in any other place. After this internship, I am even more motivated to attend law school and become an attorney to further the mission of uncovering the truth and obtaining justice for victims of fraud and other financial crimes.

This is the next in a series of posts by recipients of the Career Services Summer Funding Grant. We’ve asked funding recipients to reflect on their summer experiences and talk about the industries in which they’ve been spending their summer. You can read the entire series here.

This entry is by Kudakwashe Mawungadize, COL ’18

This past summer I got to spend part of it doing an efficacy of the cold chain as a way of increasing the rates of vaccinations in the remote areas of Zimbabwe. The idea of the cold chain, which involves harnessing the excess power from cell phone towers and using it to power refrigerators that are designed with sensors to maintain the temperatures at a level were vaccines remain viable was borne of a Penn professor, Dr. Harvey Rubin.

I worked in Bulawayo, which is the second biggest city in Zimbabwe. The people there speak a dialect called Ndebele, which sounds almost similar to Zulu. I spent most of my time rotating among the local clinics and attended many vaccination days which are days that are reserved by local clinics to conduct vaccinations. These were my favorite days. They started very early and usually entailed riding a couple of kilometers to the cell phone towers. There the nurses would collect the vaccines and put them in small coolers. We would then ride to the local clinic where usually the parents would already be lining up with their kids, trying to get the vaccinations done before they can go to their farms.

The day after the vaccination days we would go into the community to find out which parents had not taken their kids to get vaccinated. We would conduct interviews to find out what their main reasons were for their refusal to seek out vaccinations. About 40% of the parents with infants missed vaccination days. Almost all of them sited religion as their reason for not seeking out vaccinations. They belong to an apostolic sect that frowns upon seeking health intervention for any ailment whatsoever.

After having realized the situation, the staff at the local clinics designed pamphlets to educate people on the benefits of vaccinations, and began to hand them out a couple of days before a scheduled vaccination day. In addition, the local clinics started a campaign targeted at getting the local teachers to include in their curriculum information about why vaccinations are important in their night classes which mainly comprise the adult population.

Efforts were also made to talk to the church leaders of the apostolic sect to see if they could change their doctrine about seeking medical intervention. Some of the leaders were quite understanding and one in particular actually invited us to bring a vaccination team to their church after a service to administer shots and have an information session on why vaccinations matter.

The clinics also sent out teams into even more remote areas to see if they could organize vaccination days so that the people who had the burden of walking kilometers and kilometers did not have to but instead could have their vaccinations administered at local venues such as playgrounds and classrooms at local schools. This proved to be even more helpful in increasing the numbers of people who were coming to get their children vaccinated.

This experience was one to cherish because I got to be on the ground to see how people who are on the receiving end of innovation can sometimes still have many factors blocking them from benefitting from the innovation. It was also amazing because I got to interact with the locals and partake in their daily activities which made me feel like a part of the community.