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Miolene, a double major in global studies and journalism, started her position as a Youth Representative for the Center for Public Health in Nigeria at a pivotal time. Miolene herself was only an undergrad and new representative when the region her NGO called home was hit with a deadly Ebola outbreak. At the UN, she had little time to do anything but listen during roundtable discussions and hearings on the fate of West Africa amidst the crisis. Miolene took copious notes, trying her best to absorb and synthesize all that was happening around her. Despite the intensity of that time, for Miolene “getting into the halls of the United Nations at a very young age, it was awe-inspiring for me.”

    Furthermore, she recalls her experiences at the United Nations vividly for the way it changed her observations of the world around her “I remember just feeling how big the world was, and how much I wanted to be a part of it in whatever way that might look like.”

    This mindset took Miolene far– to places like Save The Children, Global Health Corps, and UNICEF. Miolene describes her initial role at Save The Children right out of college as “a fantastic place to learn to soak up that international development playing field.” But the urge to go international and experience something different pushed her to Global Health Corps, where Miolene was able to get on-the-ground experience working for an HIV clinic in Kampala, Uganda for a year. Her job there was to write, take photographs, and record video to show the organization’s impact, working to reach a global audience and rally funding for the medical professionals working the clinic. 

This launched her into consultancy work for UNICEF, where she was able to do work in the Maldives. She described this experience as “living a dream, trying to bring stories to the global audience about the work that they [UNICEF] were doing, the problems that kids were facing, and do that through photo and video.” Soon after, she came back to the US for a consultancy focused on domestic issues in South and Middle America for Save The Children, then went back to UNICEF to work on the Global Partnership to End Violence Against Children. The thread weaving all these experiences together for Miolene was the fact that they all hit “this sweet spot of writing and telling stories about the things that I was interested in.”

    Yet deep down, Miolene still held onto her childhood dream of being a journalist, and so during COVID-19, she decided to go back to school. At Stanford, she got her masters in Journalism. She wrote a beat on migration during her time at Stanford and got a job at the San Jose Mercury News soon after, where she reported on education across the Bay Area.

    Now, in her role as a reporter for Devex, a news platform that focuses on global development, Miolene’s outlook has not changed much. “I have found this role where I'm covering global development. I am covering US foreign assistance. I am covering the way in which decisions from Washington ripple out to the world as it relates to aid and policy, and a lot of that was baked into me from the stuff that I did at Lehigh.” In this role, Miolene has gotten to cover what she is truly passionate about, in a way she is truly passionate about: by storytelling.

Most recently, Miolene has published an article on how the United States foreign aid freeze is affecting the greater aid sector since the Trump administration has taken office. Additionally, just a week before that, her position brought Miolene to Davos, Switzerland for the World Economic Forum. In Davos, she spent the week trying to uncover subliminal messages in regards to development and foreign policy in larger macroeconomic conversations.

To Miolene, the first step to experiencing these opportunities is as simple as “peeling back the layers of everything that is provided to students.” She uses the summer she spent in (?) Ghana through a Lehigh public health grant as an example. Saying, “I was so young, but the exposure for me was incredible.” For Miolene, that summer was all about soaking up the incredible learning opportunity she got. “It was a poignant time for me to cement the desire I had to do international facing work,” she said.

For like-minded students, Miolene advises toward “Building good relationships with professors that'll think of you when an opportunity comes up, staying in touch with classmates that have similar interests to you, and being part of clubs.” Especially for unique international opportunities like the Lehigh/United Nations Partnership or studying abroad, Miolene speaks from experience when she says, “Go somewhere and learn something to bring back with you. Let that form what you're going to do for your future.”