Interview With the Future!

“When people don’t express themselves, they die one piece at a time. You’d be shocked at how many adults are really dead inside—walking through their days with no idea who they are, just waiting for a heart attack or cancer or a Mack truck to come along and finish the job. It’s the saddest thing I know.”-Lauren Halse Anderson, Speak

According to Roadtrip Nation's book, the authors define a roadmap as the "experience of defining your own life," as seen in "individuals who live meaningful lives getting paid to do what they love."

Yes, I'll admit it does sound corny; however, can you all imagine what kind of life we would all lead if we only did what everyone else told us to do? While that notion sounds preposterous, we do it all the time. We rarely take the time to analyze critically why we choose to do what we do, especially when it comes to our careers and our future layouts of life. For instance, we often hear people say, "Oh, I am studying to be a doctor or lawyer or police officer because everyone in my family is one." In the end, people's expectations often may lead us astray since our parents, community, society, and culture rarely tailor their aspirations and goals to our specific inclinations and dreams.

Furthermore, while I fell in love with psychology after some high school exposure, I realize that I do not want to spend the rest of my life as a psychologist since I would eventually internalize a lot of my patient's problems. I further cemented that realization in my mind when I worked as a behavioral therapist; I realized that I had a hard time being objective in the face of people's troubles, even if I was good at listening and possibly providing advice.

So, I decided that before I tried to pursue my dream job that I would like to travel and live around the world, helping impoverished communities. However, since this is a new development, I decided to interview a very unique and accomplished individual. Her name is Megan Berwick.

Megan Berwick

After receiving her BA in International Political Economy from Colorado College, she lived in various places like China. However, in my humble opinion, the most notable country she lived and worked in was Haiti. Mahdavi ended up not only working alongside Michel Martelly, the former President of Haiti and former Haitian singer, but she was also in charge of developing a program to alleviate poverty in Haiti via conditional cash transfers. Consequently, I find her impressive because she managed to mesh what she loved into an empty niche in order to make a difference.

So, I decided to quickly interview her via email since she is busy on a number of projects, even in the middle of a pandemic.

1. What were you thinking like in your final year about the next steps and where to go and how to get there?

"At Lake Hastings, I majored in international political economy since I wanted to play a role in the world that I thought was positive. Not only that, I wanted to live in other countries and speak other languages. I wanted to be connected to the world somehow. It meant so much though. In my last year, at the same time, I looked at technology taking off, entrepreneurships, and California. And I'd say that, you know, as you bring everything together, I think you can look at, at eight agencies and they play a role in the world. But I've actually been very keen on the role of the private sector plays in the world and building real value. Because I think young people everywhere want to contribute value. And I do believe that the private sector is this amazing vehicle for building skills, building companies that are growing their economies."

2. What is the mentality behind the jobs that you took up on in your roadmap?

"I read Muhammad Yunus and was inspired by microfinance. I also worked in microfinance for years with Kiva.org and San Francisco. After that, I worked in Mobile Financial Services funds being used for transfers, so the financial services sector really spoke to me. However, the deeper I got into it more, I began to understand that it was technology and understanding how you build technology services in countries that was important. We can do this and be so much more connected with technology. So, for me, the private sector was like almost always in social entrepreneurship, which are the startups in this sector. They operate the same way. The mentality is the same way. It is build a model that can be effective, test it, and look for market adoption."

3. What was it like to go and live in a country that was inhabited by people that did not look like you? What was your experience like?

"I studied Chinese in college. I did a language intensive courses outside of Beijing, but I liked Shanghai better. To mingle, I went to bars and went out to American Chamber of Commerce mixers to meet people. People would think, " Oh, another white girl wants to get a job in China. How rare I'm sure you'll find something right away." However, one of those people actually ended up being the one who introduced me to a law firm, which was the largest law firm in Shanghai in which I took over their marketing and their business development with us. Then, I called up US law firms to ask if they had marketing people who could tell me how to do my job. Fortunately, Silicon Valley met with me to tell me how to do my job before I went back to Shanghai. Along with being white in China, my natural personality traits like being super bubbly and smiley and high energy, made me come off kind of dumb. I was coming into things in a very big and very California way, which diminishing my credibility. I think there are certain things we realize. There are things I love about China. But, there were other things that made it so hard to live in China."

4. After you got your MA from Stanford, what were some of the struggles that you faced while you were working for the Haitian government?

"I internalized a lot of things especially when it came to working for governments since I did not know what I was getting into. I think working for the US government probably has as many trying moments in terms of what's your personal integrity? Who am I serving is a big question. I had always focused on the integrity of the government the people were serving. It came to a point that I saw the full perspective, which consisted of an enormous amount of money being stolen by that government. When you look at it and you say, "But I was fighting that fight, I was really delivering cash transfers to people." You can see two ways. You can see that, yes, "I reduce the amount that was stolen by maybe fourteen million dollars, twenty million dollars more." You can see it; however, then your program became the legitimate front. They've bought enough popular support so they could steal it to the point that I began to doubt the entire validity and ethics of what I was doing. I recalled the world telling me exactly what a disaster I would create. But then you remember that this country existed long before you showed up, which helped since I was hardly the most important part of their history. So, you don't have to take so much guilt on yourself. The other piece is that I bought into the idea that this was the most important work I could be doing to the point that it would have an enormous impact on an entire population in a country. I was both incredibly inspired but my energy and light source got burned out due to active manipulation, death threats, and riots. I came back it fairly destroyed on an emotional level."

5. What lesson would you tell college students if you could?

"So I would say the lesson that I would share with college students is 1) definitely party because you're young and beautiful because you definitely don't want to be the 50-year-old, 2) indulge in the career options that you think you want for a year, for two years, and then don't punish yourself for switching, and 3) do the jobs that build the meat and potatoes of your skill base. You should be grateful for anytime that is senior, technically skilled person spends revising and criticizing your work because one day you're going to be that person on the spot and you'll be grateful every day."

Bonus

I have a phone interview attached below with a very impressive and successful man though he started at the bottom like everyone, which I think is an important takeaway. In other words, we always here about very impressive individuals with degrees from prestigious universities and awesome jobs to the point that they often do not seem like everyday individuals; however, in reality, they not only started at 0 like everyone else, but they also grappled with concepts that most people are familiar with like fear.

To prove my point you can hear the audio recording of Michael L. Ross though please ignore the dreadful sound that is called my voice since I was quite apprehensive. Please and thank you!

Without further ado...

https://video.wixstatic.com/video/24c2ae_3fc817d6c55744b6b225bfedc74af9a4/720p/mp4/file.mp4