News

When Ana Sofia Mendoza applied to be a Youth Representative, she didn't expect to be accepted as a first-year and never anticipated the many opportunities it would bring. 

As a Youth Representative, Mendoza has advocated on behalf of the Armenian non-governmental organization (NGO) Nor Luyce at the United Nations for three years. During that time, she has had the opportunity to attend several high-level meetings and speak on behalf of Nor Luyce at the UN. Because of her exceptional service to the NGO and her fluency in Spanish, she was hired as an intern at the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). The UNDP is a global UN development agency operating in 170 countries and territories, aiming to eradicate poverty.

The internship came about during a discussion between Bill Hunter, LU/UN Partnership Director, and Lehigh alumna Victoria Brezheniuk, the E-learning and Capacity-Building Analyst at the UNDP's Learning for Nature Initiative, who was looking for a student intern to help with translation work. Mendoza immediately came to mind. 

As a UNDP intern, Mendoza used her language skills to create materials for the Learning for Nature Team. Learning for Nature is a subsidiary initiative of UNDP. This branch provides free online learning tools in different languages to educate global communities about biodiversity and sustainable development. 

Mendoza completed her internship with UNDP remotely while studying abroad in Oxford, England, on the Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarship. Because her internship was remote, Mendoza could work at her own pace and manage her workload alongside her courses at Oxford University.

Mendoza was the 62nd Lehigh student in a row to be accepted as an intern at the UN. She is a senior at Lehigh, double majoring in Political Science and Sociology. 

Growing up in Lima, Peru, Mendoza is bilingual, speaking English and Spanish. She completed her first two years of high school in Peru before moving to Portland, Oregon, to finish her education. 

Her experience as a youth representative for Nor Luyce familiarized her with United Nations systems before she began her internship with the UNDP. 

In addition to working as a Youth Representative for Nor Luyce, Mendoza was also a summer intern for Nor Luyce as a recipient of the Iacocca International Internship Program (IIIP). Through this program, she lived in Armenia, where the NGO is based, and worked alongside the NGO’s president and founder, Shogher Mikelyan. 

As a summer intern with Mikelyan, Mendoza helped advance the NGO’s mission of providing young women from socially vulnerable families with career mentorship and educational resources. In this role, she helped Mikelyan secure a $25,000 grant from the U.S. Embassy of Armenia.

“Ana Sofia genuinely believes in creating opportunities for young people, young women. Why I'm sure about that is because I see it in her work, the way she takes care of things. She doesn't accept her Youth Representative role as kind of simple as a title or just something to write down on her resume. She takes it as she owns it. She owns her work,” Mikelyan said. 

Mendoza’s ambition to pursue opportunities that excite her stretches from her extracurriculars to her classroom work. Associate professor of anthropology and sociology Ceran Anaya taught Mendoza in his class, Race, Ethnicity, and the Americas. He says talented students like Mendoza should aim high because they are surrounded by opportunities. 

“I always tell my advisees that they should dream big, really big. That their limits have to do with how they think of limits,” Ceran Anaya said. 

Mendoza has made pursuing her dreams a goal of her college career.

“You might never get a chance to experience all these things again. When can you ever represent an NGO at the United Nations headquarters? I think that's what motivates me to seek out these unique experiences. So it's really up to me to go and grab them.” 

After graduating from Lehigh in the spring, she plans to attend law school. She hopes to bring this same mindset to her post-graduate studies as she explores the interests she has developed in immigration law and policy.