Alanna Shaikh, International Public Health practitioner

So tell me about that process – what did you do at undergrad, and how did your job-search go?
Alanna: I graduated from Georgetown with a bachelor’s degree in Middle East Studies, and realized there was nothing I wanted to do that I was qualified for. I applied for a lot of administrative assistant jobs and then found an overseas internship program at the American University in Cairo for recently graduated seniors. I applied and was accepted – so I went to Cairo to work for AUC there as the “head intern” in the Office of the University President. It was for one academic year, and I was paid $300/month and given a great apartment in downtown Cairo.
I spent the year learning to live in the Middle East, learning about university administration, and wondering what I would do next, since I already knew there were no jobs I wanted that I could get with my bachelor’s degree. I realized all the stuff I did want to do required an MPH, so I ended up in an MPH program at Boston University. I LOVED it. As an undergraduate I really studied and fought and bled to hold a GPA of 3.0, and then grad school was just where my passion was – I got straight As. I had to work, but the work was so interesting, it didn’t feel oppressive. I took loans to get through grad school, and I am still paying them now. My aim is to clear them by the time my 4-year-old son goes to university!
I didn’t have the usual post-school job search. After I had finished my coursework, while I was writing up my MPH paper, a classmate got in touch with me. His dad worked for UNFPA (the United Nations Population Fund), and since I was interested in reproductive and maternal health I had been in email correspondence with his dad (he had mentored me a little). His dad was at a reception in New York and met the Central Asia UNFPA director and told him that he knew a girl who might want to be an intern with UNFPA. He gave me the email address for the guy in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. I basically just emailed a million times until he said I could be their intern. I was an intern for a year, and then got a job with a USAID-funded health project, since I was already there in Tashkent and knew the situation. At this point my only previous field experience was the year in Cairo aside from a summer in Kuwait City in high school and some family visits to Karachi.
I didn’t have any funding for the internship – I just estimated how much it would cost me every month to live in Tashkent, figured out how long I wanted to stay (six months), then I got a job, saved up the money, and got on a plane to Tashkent. There is funding for overseas internships, but most of it seems to be for graduate students. I actually ended staying at my internship for a full year, funding the extra six months with a US government fellowship that no longer seems to exist and a stipend that UNFPA found for me (they also reclassified me as a consultant at that point). I think I was on the budget as their English teacher! It was not a large stipend, and for six months my little brother actually paid my student loans for me (he’s a great guy!), but then his financial situation changed, and I deferred them.
But I got to Tashkent on my own, and I don’t think I could have gotten that fellowship if I wasn’t already there.
The internship pretty much launched my global health career – it led to the job that led to my next job and so forth. My first real job after the internship was as a program manager with a USAID-funded health project. It was a great job for me at that point – I did a lot of writing, which teaches you about the inner workings of development work very quickly. It also had more actual work than expat jobs usually do; I was involved in designing educational campaigns on health topics and writing focus group guides. I even did some training.



Well, this is inspiring. 

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