We spoke to the Impact Lab students interns at FSI during the Spring 2021 semester to find out their learnings and experiences at the Impact Lab, as well as their take on social impact.
In this series, meet Fiona, Shared Data Intern at Foundation for Shared Impact.
Tell us about yourself? Which year are you in and what subject are you majoring in? What is one fun fact that people don’t know about you? What is the best thing about being you right now?
I am a year three student holding a Bachelor’s Degree in Engineering in Computer Science (BEng(CS)) at The University of Hong Kong. I love eating pizza and honestly, I am quite satisfied with my life right now.
Tell us about your experience at Impact Lab? What are your roles and responsibilities?
I am responsible for building a full-fledged directory of charities to help bring transparency and efficiency to the charity sector. I performed that by utilizing digital tools such as Python scraping to gather data.
What is unique about the company that you work at?
FSI is unique because it aims at sharing information and resources with partner companies to create greater shared impacts.
What are the major learnings that you gained from participating in Impact Lab? How has the experience helped your understanding of social impact?
The major learning I gained from Impact Lab is to be proactive in learning. It is very important to have a can-do attitude instead of being passive and wait for things to happen. This attitude would allow me to learn and try many more things. I have realized something when I was doing Python scraping in this internship, which was that I never had tried web scraping before and this was totally new to me. Even though there was no professor to teach me that with a step-by-step guide, I still learned it by doing research online and with the help of my supervisor. This way of learning is way more efficient and effective than passive learning in class. On top of that, solving a problem by ourselves is very rewarding and also helps to solidify the learning.
Also, the experience helped me realize that there are lots of things that we can do to create positive social change in the lives of many. For instance, Foundation for Shared Impact aims to bring people together to share data and resources broadly, so as to drive social impact. That is because increasing the transparency of information can allow anyone to gain a better insight and to get new opinions. I have never thought of that before and the internship experience has allowed me to get a new perspective of driving positive social change.
How has this experience benefited your personal growth? How will this experience benefit your future, in terms of your career and/or other endeavors?
I have learned teamwork and leadership skills, which are the soft skills essential to my future career. For team communication skills, I have observed the importance of achieving team coordination through fostering open communication. Our work progressed much more quickly after we have shared our knowledge, code and useful links with each other. Time is saved as the knowledge required for various tasks is very similar, and the same code used for web scraping can be modified to suit data scraping another webpage. For the leadership skills, I have assisted some other team members to get familiar with what we were doing and helped to decide on our common goal. Having these experiences allow me to be better at taking responsibility and communication, as it is of paramount importance that we need to convey our messages clearly and precisely when we adopt a leadership role. These skills are essential to my future career since working effectively with others in the workplace is crucial to the success of all businesses.
How has the COVID-19 pandemic affected you?
I can’t travel because of the pandemic.
The pandemic has caused many unprecedented challenges for social impact organizations. From working at the company, how do you think the pandemic has affected the organization, its leaders, and its beneficiaries?
Communication could be affected by the virus, as people can’t easily have face-to-face meetings now.
If there is one thing you can do for the world right now, what would it be?
If there is one thing I can do for the world right now, I would like to end all social injustice. It is extremely distressing to see that people with good intentions and do good work are being punished, while the bad actors are rewarded in today’s world. There seems to be no hope at all. Still, I believe that we should do what is right, and stick to our own values. It is true that being righteous and kind is never easy, but it is the most important thing that we should do in order to end injustice.
Would you recommend the Impact Lab to other students? Why?
Yes, I would recommend Impact Lab to other students as it is a valuable opportunity for us to learn and grow. This is because having hands-on experience allows us to learn in a more comprehensive way through trial and error, and to understand the gaps between theory and practice. It is an enjoyable and effective way to improve our soft skills and consolidate what we have learned at school.
