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Asia Night
One of the favorite
student activities at The Fletcher School are cultural nights.
They involve food, music, dancing, exchanging of ideas and a chance to
party.
This year, Fletcher hosted Africa Night, Asia Night,
Mediterranean Night and Latin Fiesta. |
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From Tibet to South Korea, and India to Indonesia, Fletcher
students live and work all over Asia. Four of them recently sat
down to talk about their
experiences. Bhuvana Anand, MALD ‘04 Bhuvana hails from Mumbai, India. Before coming to Fletcher, she worked as a Research Associate for a free-market think tank called the “Center for Civil Society” in New Delhi.  “I worked on issues related to economic freedom for entry level
professions, liberalization of the education sector and economic
reconstruction of Afghanistan,” said Anand. She also edited the
Center’s publications and assisted with programming.Bhuvana hopes that her studies at Fletcher will allow her to build on her previous experience to work internationally. “I think in the beginning my work will lead me to living in developing countries in Southeast Asia. I am very open to going wherever my work will take me.” “My work prior to Fletcher was focused on understanding domestic economic policy in India, but right now I am focused on studying issues of development and trade across countries. My work provides me with a background and a context against which I can evaluate what I learn and also understand it better.” While Bhuvana misses home, she has quickly adjusted to life in the States. “I love Boston for its nice mix of culture and big city character. My fun living situation with [her infamous roommates and Fletcher students] Emma, Marti and Hadley has a lot to do with why I am enjoying myself so much.” Renee Kim Renee Kim, originally from Seoul, South Korea, is a former reporter for Bloomberg News, a wire service that specializes in providing financial news via Bloomberg financial data terminals around the world. “My job involved reporting commodity-related news--from stories about steel slabs to garlic disputes to spiking oil prices. I’d work on international stories with reporters from different bureaus across the world, which sparked my interest in global trade relations.”  “The best and worst part of the job is that my workday was never
predictable because I had no idea when or how a story may break.
It was a challenging job, especially as a Korean working for the
foreign press, as there are many differences between the domestic
and international media’s reporting style.”Prior to Bloomberg, Renee worked as a business news reporter at Arirang TV, the first English-language cable TV station in Korea. Renee reports having to get used the intricacies of Boston after leaving Seoul. “I’m still trying to figure out the maze-like Boston roads and why a right turn is never really a right turn that takes me where I want to go.” Renee is concentrating on business law and the Pacific Asia region at Fletcher. She plans to return to Korea after her studies to continue to work in journalism. Tsering Yangki A Tibetan born in India, Tsering’s work and academic interest in India and Nepal focused on political and economic development of the Tibetan communities, in exile and in Tibet. “Before coming to Fletcher, I worked for the School for International Training’s (SIT) Tibetan Studies Semester Abroad program as a coordinator, which involved traveling, teaching, primary research, coordination of trips, and program designing.”  Tsering also worked for the Tibetan Parliamentary and Policy
Research Center, one of the first Tibetan exile think tanks,
studying policy analysis and formulation of democratization and
development. When finished at Fletcher, Tsering hopes to be able to work in Tibet. “Although I was born in India and it is my home, I have always felt the strongest desire to go back to Tibet, where I belong. It is not about nationalism or patriotism it is about choice. I have not had the choice to be or not to be a refugee, but I hope I will have the choice to follow my passion – rural development work in Tibet.” Tsering said her work in India prepared her for moving to the States. “Since July 2002, when I first got to the US, my learning curve has been steep. While working for SIT, my American undergraduate students would talk about cultural differences and commonalities; I think they really prepared me for my first visit to the United States.” Oren Murphy After graduating from Vassar College, Oren spent the past seven years working and living in Indonesia. He started with a two-year English teaching fellowship in Central Java and said, “Once I was there, opportunities kept presenting themselves.” Oren spent the last two years working on a USAID Office of Transitions (OTI) contract. “I was a program officer. I was doing grants development for ongoing and post-conflict recovery strategies. I was focusing on three different conflict areas and headed up two of them, in Aceh and North Maluku.” “In Aceh, where there was a secessionist movement, we funded the mediators, the Henry Dunant Center, and also did a lot of work on drafting legislation for their special autonomy bill and socializing that—sort of doing a lot of community meetings, trying to get more civil society input. The provincial government wasn’t making much of an effort to promote how the social autonomy bill would look.”  “In North Maluku, it was more of a post-conflict situation, the
biggest problem was with internally displaced persons (IDPs); most
of the work we did focused on assisting the provincial government
in assisting IDPs. It was much more a typical reconstruction,
socioeconomic rehabilitation project—trying to get kids back in
school, people back in their homes.”Oren fell in love with Indonesia. “Indonesia’s got a lot of problems. But the people have been amazing. It’s a very welcoming, easy country to live in. I speak Indonesian fluently, which was a huge asset in terms of my job. No matter where you work, understanding the culture is equally if not more important than technical knowledge. That’s why I’m doing language and political science classes on the region for the Middle East.” When he is finished at Fletcher, Oren hopes to do similar work in a different region, hopefully in the Middle East. “Part of my reason for coming to Fletcher was to get out of Indonesia and shift regional focuses and to have the time to reevaluate the type of work I was doing and want to do.” |
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2002 The Fletcher School, Tufts
University |
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