I grew up in Beijing and left when I was 16 to go to high school in the US. After that, I went to Harvard and studied applied maths and economics and became very interested in international development. At first it was an academic interest and I was going to do a PhD, but I decided academia wasn’t for me. So I went to work for McKinsey for three years and did a lot of work in developing countries, with governments, NGOs and companies that were thinking of getting into new markets. There was a lot of focus on health, which was an area that really interested me.
McKinsey was a really good chance to experience a lot in a short period of time but it was never where I was going to pursue a career, so I went back to school. I’m now doing a three-year degree which is an MBA at Stanford and an MPA/ID (public administration and international development) at Harvard Kennedy school of government.
In the summers I’ve been building up my experience on the ground by doing small consulting projects. Last summer, I was in Bangladesh working for a for-profit social enterprise. We partnered with Brac, a non-profit organisation, and a created a mobile technology for health workers who were looking after pregnant women in rural areas. From this I learnt that I wanted to create customised solutions for social enterprises.