EduHealth’s work this semester has gotten off to a great start. We streamlined our portfolio of projects to focus on three areas: working with a management 100 team to create and execute a publicity campaign in West Philadelphia for the Sayre Health Center, working with Theresa to expand the internship program and rallying the faculty and student population to push for social entrepreneurship in the Wharton School not just as an extracurricular, but more fundamentally as an academic program with research output.

I am glad that the other student groups we contacted, such as the Wharton Advisory Board, have been enthusiastic about pushing this forward. The fundamental step would be to create a working definition of social entrepreneurship, use it to define a program that serves as our end-goal, and then create the pitch for it. This pitch requires both hard and soft sells: the hard sell would involve gathering data on student interest, comparative studies of what other schools are doing, the number of student groups that exist, and the number of students involved in some social entrepreneurial field work.

However, hard data is seldom enough to persuade as the human being is both visceral and rational. Thus, putting together the EduHealth learning experience, as well as the other experiences of students working in West Philadelphia, is needed to provide a story for all this data to find a context. It is not just students having interests; it is about students going into the field, making a difference, learning new things, and raising the profile of Penn.

I am sure that with any large university comes with its fair share of bureaucracy. By and large, my experiences with the Penn bureaucracy have been pleasant except for my interactions with Student Financial Services (and also in claiming reimbursements). This office handles the financial aid application for students. It is no understatement to call my interactions with them a painful and humiliating experience.

In April, I submitted my financial aid application. I called in June, and the staff informed me that they were still processing it, but that I should prepare for the worse being an international student from Singapore. I called again in August and was told that for some reason, they had not processed it and the application had been sitting there since April untouched. When I returned in September, I called and was told that no action had been taken and that I should call at the end of the week for a decision.

When I called at the end of the week, the person answering the call, before even hearing my situation, launched into this polemic of how international students should not be applying for aid now when they never indicated it on their application as we would otherwise be highly unlikely to be admitted. I finally managed to get a word in that my financial circumstances had changed, and that they were sitting on my application for ages. He said it was still not being processed, and that they will take a look at it.

So it is back to square one. I think I had enough dealing with them.

(Pyongyang, North Korea) Its’ all out there anyway…

I gave a presentation on my trip to Pyongyang over the weekend to the Penn community, and screened a video of the Worker Party’s 60th anniversary celebration which I brought back from North Korea. It was great fun combining my interest in North Korea with my love of PowerPoint.

Most Americans have a vague idea of North Korea. I can tell people I went to Pyongyang and their first response would be “Nice. Did you have fun?” as if I had just made a trip to Florida or San Francisco. They need to be reminded (“No, it’s the one with nuclear bombs!”) before they realize it’s not exactly a “holiday”.

Just last week, I mailed off a letter to North Korea. It is officially the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), and this has been a great source of confusion. The post office clerk kept insisting that the Republic of Korea (South Korea) was the DPRK and that she had the mailing address right.

Clerk: It says Republic of Korea right?
Me: It’s the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. That’s a different country. You have South Korea there.
Clerk: But there’s only one Korea. How can there be that many Koreas?
Me: I am pretty sure there are two of them.
Clerk: Its’ all out there anyway.

(Shanghai, China) The environment and growth…

I recently found out that the ArtIntern, the social entrepreneurial project I helped initiated and founded was featured by the International Labor Organization as a best practice in youth employment in their global study of the field. I am delighted that our work could possibly inspire similar projects elsewhere, although their details on our work are a little dated.

I took some parts of my research this summer out for an article on corporate social responsibility in China which is published by CSR Asia. I will also have a separate article coming out in another publication on CSR in Asia (in China specifically).

I have uploaded the full paper here. The abstract is below:

Just this year, China’s biggest telecommunications firm, China Mobile, issued its first corporate social responsibility (CSR) report. For a country where CSR is a relatively new concept, and with few organized groups of stakeholders demanding accountability, this might come as a surprise. What explains this change?

Pressure for firms to consider their broader impact of their economic actions on society originates from the social, political, and environmental circumstances they face. In China, the concept of corporate citizenship and the social and environmental responsibilities it entails for firms is barely adhered to with failures in work safety or labor conditions which could potentially disrupt the legitimacy of economic expansion. However, there is also great potential for corporate citizenship to be advanced within the framework of the Harmonious Society policy in China. This policy emphasizes the tackling of social and environmental challenges as national priorities. While proponents of corporate citizenship have observed the overlap between the Harmonious Society policy’s aims and corporate citizenship objectives, they have not established how the two concepts converge or diverge, especially in the mechanisms and theoretical basis underlying either concept. Most importantly, there has been limited exploration of the obstacles that must be cleared before the gap between the potential and reality of corporate citizenship under this framework is diminished.

My paper argues that the Harmonious Society policy can be a framework driving corporate citizenship. However, it faces definition and implementation challenges that can be overcome through state, industry, and civil society dialogue.

Update: I am glad that my article makes an impact. I just received an email about it from a leading executive of a large investment management fund who hopes to learn more.

(Shanghai, China) Where to next?

Summer 2008 is not too far away and already thoughts are drifting to internship applications. I have started thinking about this too, especially since my summer experience will set the tone for my initial career path. After talking to people at the World Economic Forum, and with previous bosses and my academic advisors, I am inclined to go down the finance route (although I will not preclude a consulting experience) for the first part of my career before making a switch into more public-oriented fields.

For most students here, New York City is the most logical option for them. For many of the international students from Asia, Hong Kong is another top choice. London is seldom considered. However, I am contemplating choosing London as a top choice. One of my previous boss suggested London as it is the only truly “international” financial market with New York offices largely serving the US and Hong Kong offices largely serving China. Having had Asian work experience, and studying in the US, he recommends that I check out London. I am also in favor of London because I believe its culture is more consensual and diverse compared to the frattier atmosphere in New York banking offices. That boss argues that at the end of the day, I should go with my impressions of the people I will work with, although that is unhelpful in an application process.

Some questions I have on working in London (versus NYC, versus HK)

1. What markets will I cover? Am I expected to cover European markets and in the long-term, will it hurt me if I lack knowledge of continental European languages?
2. How does working hours compare? How does work culture and general culture compare (i.e. more business-oriented US office versus more broader interests in London?)?
3. What kind of work do analysts in this office do? How diverse is the work exposure (e.g. client meetings or just analysis) compared to elsewhere and what experience would be better as an analyst?
4. What type of deals dominates in these offices?
5. In terms of promotions and career path, how would it stack up against NYC and HK especially in the long term?
6. If I wish to move to Asia for a long-term stint, would it make more sense to go directly to HK? Is it easier to move from NYC to elsewhere rather than vice versa?

I will probably come up with more questions over the week.

(Dalian, China) And so the summer ends…

It has been a whirlwind of work since coming back to school, in stark contrast to the relatively calm routine of my summer (North Korea withstanding). I come back to great news, as Prof. Harkavy informed me that our work on EduHealth had inspired discussions on a possible new concentration or program at Wharton focusing on urban Social Entrepreneurship. Faculty has been involved in the discussion and things are moving ahead. Prof. Asher suggested that a research center focusing on this area be created in support of such a program, and to be developed as a leading research center on social enterprise. What we need to do now is to involve ourselves as catalysts sustaining this momentum and making sure all these become reality.

I have also restarted my Korean studies with the aim of doing an exchange at Kim Il Sung University in North Korea. I have been dedicating significant efforts to finding information in this area and I have turned up several useful leads. I have been asked frequently why I wished to study in North Korea and my answer is simple: there is no other country that offers such an insight into history and communism, and understanding the North Korea psyche and worldview is interesting. With regards to my near-death experience with the soldiers on the train, I learned long ago not to let fear and intimidation prevent me from doing what I want to do, and going to North Korea is a reaffirmation of this value.

For the next week, I will be at the World Economic Forum’s Global Growth Companies Summit in Dalian. Billed as a “Summer Davos” by the Chinese media, it will be a gathering of a select group of companies expected to be the leaders of the next business generation. After this event, I will head back to school for another intense semester of academic exploration and extracurricular immersion.

I am looking forward to seeing this event happen after having watched all the hard work my colleagues have put into making this event happen. I am truly impressed by the attention to every minute details of the program by the staff here in the Beijing office. I am also grateful for the work opportunity given to me by my boss. Although after an intense start to my internship, work died down on my side as my boss was more involved in the short-term conference details rather than the long-term planning that I was supposed to do. I managed to use my spare time for my research on corporate social responsibility within the context of a “Harmonious Society”, and hopefully this work will benefit my colleagues at the Global Citizenship Initiative.

It has been an amazing summer and I feel terribly reluctant about returning to school. In addition to the independence I feel now, and the parochialism that seems to dominate my school life, I am also beginning to feel the pinch of the financial burdens of my education. I am not too keen to return to school for these reasons, and hope to begin exploring life outside of school soon.