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- So my name is Peter Wongandall
I am a rising senior at the University of Pennsylvania.
I'm studying Finance and Operational Management
with minors in Professional Relations and Economics.
I was born in Shanghai, China.
Lived there for the first 8 years of my life,
and then moved to Norway with my family when I was 8.
I lived there until I was 16
and then came to college in the US.
So yeah, I'm doing consulting for the summer in New York.
- What's it been like working in New York City?
- I think, I'm extremely passionate about my job.
So I'm working for this firm called
Dalberg Global Development Advisors,
and it's basically a strategy consultant firm
that works with the United Nations,
the World Bank, US Aid, foreign governments,
on various areas of developments and impact.
So things like healthcare, education,
infrastructure, sanitation, and agriculture.
It will basically help them with a variety
of different projects and helping them do strategy.
So what I'm doing right now, is we're working on a
community health financing piece,
in which we're working with US Aid and the
United Nations Special Envoy for Global Health,
and we're trying to develop an understanding of
how much money goes into community health systems today
in order to better advocate for investing in
community health to various Ministries of Health,
and Ministries of Finances in developing countries.
And I love it, it's amazing.
The work is amazing.
The work-life balance is pretty good,
and just like, living in New York which is amazing.
I love it.
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- So, I study, my major is in Business.
I'm pursuing a business degree,
an undergraduate business degree,
which is a little different.
It's one of the few undergraduate business schools.
It's called the Wharton School of Business.
- I've heard of it.
- Yeah, so it's different because it's
kind of structured like an MBA,
in which, like you're, but it's also different because
half my curriculum is Business,
and half my curriculum is Liberal Arts,
so I have a really good diversity of things.
You get to explore a lot of the topics,
and it's very kind of like,
it's structured in a sense that like
you have a lot of different areas you have to fulfill.
But, within those areas you have a lot
of freedom to kind of choosing the kind of
core course you want to take.
So, I study Finance and Operational Management,
but a lot of my, and I think Finance is very
useful, not as an area of work type thing.
I think for me, what's really driven me,
what's really helped me, in my professional
experiences and otherwise,
is the fact that Finance is a really good skillset
to apply to a lot of areas of work.
- Right.
- So, I work in International Development.
I've always pursued International Development.
But, I always look at it from a business point-of-view,
and from a financial point-of-view,
which is a really good lens to look at it.
Because a lot of non-profit NGO work is kind of
inefficient, sometimes you need you need
this kind of business efficiency, and business mindset
to actually inject something significant.
- Right.
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- So, I think there's just this thing
I'm really passionate about, and I've always done a lot
of work in for the past two, three years.
It's called Social Entrepreneurship,
Which is a concept of starting businesses that are
both profitable and impactful.
Basically, this field started because
non-profits are so inefficient sometimes.
The reason is because they don't
generate any revenue, so they're not
sustainable on it's own, and they rely on grants
or they rely on donor money
to actually sustain their operations.
- Right.
- But, as a social enterprise, you're a business first.
But you're mission-driven, right, so you make the money,
you make the profit, then you try to re-invest
that money back into the operations.
- What would be a good example of this sort of business?
- A good example of this sort of business is
actually an eyewear company called Warby Parker.
I'm not sure if you've heard of it.
Warby Parker is basically,
they started off being a social enterprise
in which for every pair of glasses they sell,
commercially for profit,
like they sell a pair of glasses in the States,
and then they donate one pair of glasses.
So, basically this is like one-for-one model.
What basically happens is a part
of your profit goes into driving the social impact, right.
- Right.
- And it goes hand-in-hand.
So I actually personally consulted for Warby Parker's
non-profit army, which we have the non-profit
inclemency partner who actually does
their distribution of eyewear to developing countries.
So that's what would be a really good example,
but there a lot of businesses out there
that actually further education.
In which they, this one firm called Brenchen Mayans,
in which, I mean, basically every start-up
within education healthcare can be categorized
as Social Enterprise because the core mission of their work
is impactful in its own.
Like education, healthcare, is an impactful field of life.
- Right.
- So those would be two really good examples.
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- [Interviewer] Consulting is a broad field.
You kind of get a negative...
- Connotation?
- Yeah, consulting is a broad field
that has a negative connotation as sort of
just being there to serve very wealthy businesses.
- Yeah.
- But it seems like what you're doing
is much more about using the skillset
of consulting in a way to make positive social change.
- Right, exactly.
And that is the mission of the firm,
Dalberg Global Development Advisors,
and I think that...
It's important because like for me,
I'm very, as many other millennials,
very driven by the social impact,
and very active in the social impact,
but also obviously we're also young
and we need to pay for our passions, right?
So what is a field, what is something that I can go into
that can allow me to pay for my passions
and pay for based financial stability
but also make social impact at the same time?
I just think this is a really good point of view for me
because I come from businesses, a lot of people
going into traditional careers like finance
and consulting, but you can also kind of
break out of that mold in which you
use those skillsets for something else.
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