I lived in Seoul once before, as a kid, one stop in a childhood that also passed through Germany, India, Sweden, and France before I landed at UCL. Going back this summer, this time with a badge, a desk, and an actual deliverable, felt like closing a loop I hadn't realised was still open. I wasn't visiting the city anymore. I was working in it, on a problem with global reach.
That problem was "Bridging Research Investment in Global Health Technology" (BRIGHT) Fund: a proposed fund designed to close the financing gap that keeps promising health research from ever becoming a usable product, specifically in the countries where that gap does the most damage. My job for six weeks was to help turn the internal case for BRIGHT into something a finance minister or a sovereign donor could actually stand on.
CAPACITIES: WHAT I HAD TO GET GOOD AT, FAST
The technical skill of the placement was source discipline: taking a document full of confident claims and asking, for every single one, can this survive someone checking it. That sounds procedural. It wasn't. Two days in, I realised the brief I'd been given (tighten some tables, polish some figures) wasn't actually the job that needed doing. Several of the appendices I'd been told to reference didn't exist. The real gap wasn't formatting. It was that almost nothing in the document could be independently verified.
I had to walk into a meeting with people considerably more senior than me and argue for a different deliverable than the one I'd been assigned. That was, without question, the hardest single conversation of the six weeks. It also taught me more about leadership than anything I'd read about it beforehand: the leadership in this placement wasn't a moment of inspiring anyone. It was the unglamorous work of noticing a scope was wrong and being willing to say so before I'd earned the standing to say it comfortably.
The rest of the six weeks was a version of that same skill, repeated. When an early draft leaned too heavily on African vaccine manufacturing data, simply because that was the data I could find fastest, I had to go back and rebuild it once I learned BRIGHT's actual base of interested countries spans Latin America and South Asia too.
CHARACTER: WHAT I WOULDN'T COMPROMISE ON
There's a version of this internship where I hit my deadlines by writing confidently and letting the sourcing catch up later. Nobody would have caught it in six weeks. I didn't do that, and not because I was told not to. Somewhere in the first week, I decided that a white paper asking governments to commit real capital doesn't get to be persuasive at the expense of being true, and I held that line even when it meant handing over a section with more flags and open questions in it than finished argument.
One of the best pieces of leadership I watched up close this summer wasn't mine. My supervisor Thamara has a habit of giving praise straight to someone's face, in the room, specifically, rather than saving it for a performance review or a group email. I noticed how much that changed how people worked around her, myself included. I'm taking that with me as a working definition of the kind of leader I want to be: someone who says the good thing directly to the person who earned it, not around them.
CHANGE MAKER VALUES: WHY THIS PROBLEM, SPECIFICALLY
The number that has stayed with me from this project isn't a BRIGHT number at all. It's that the median health product takes roughly thirteen years to go from an idea to something a patient can actually use in a low- or middle-income country, and the single longest stretch in that timeline is the stage before anyone with money has a reason to pay attention. That's not a story about bad science. It's a story about who a financing system is built to serve, and it's not neutral just because it's structural.
What BRIGHT is actually arguing for, underneath the financing architecture, is that countries in the Global South should hold real decision-making power over which health problems get solved and how, rather than having that decided for them by wherever donor capital happens to be looking that year.
GLOBAL MINDSET: WHAT SIX WEEKS OF ROOMS TAUGHT ME
I spent a good part of this placement in rooms I didn't expect to be in: the Global Vaccine Forum, coffee chats with IVI's regulatory and epidemiology teams, a conversation with Gavi's Chief Vaccine Programmes and Markets Officer about what actually makes vaccine markets viable for manufacturers. What struck me across all of it was how differently the same problem looks depending on where you're standing. A financing gap looks like a spreadsheet from a donor's side of the table and a regulatory bottleneck from a manufacturer's side, and both of them are right, just about different parts of the same failure.
Having grown up moving between countries, I'd assumed I already understood what it meant to hold multiple perspectives at once. This placement corrected that. Understanding a system well enough to argue for changing it takes more than having lived in a lot of places. It takes sitting with people who are inside the system you're writing about, long enough to notice where your first draft was wrong.
WHAT I'M CARRYING FORWARD
I don't know yet whether my career ends up in global health, in engineering, or somewhere I haven't found yet. What I do know is that I now have a concrete standard for how I want to work wherever I land: don't let a good argument outrun what it can actually prove, say the true thing even when it complicates the deadline, and pay attention to whose voice is actually doing the deciding in any room I'm in. Seoul gave me that standard this time, the same city that, years earlier, gave me somewhere to grow up. I'd like to think that's not a coincidence.