I spent the autumn of 2023 in New York as one of thirteen Occidental College seniors selected for the Kahane United Nations Program — taking courses on human rights and conflict prevention while interning with Outright International, a civil society organization advancing LGBTIQ rights within the UN system. It was one semester. I have been trying to get back ever since.
The Work
My internship with Outright placed me at the centre of UN General Assembly Third Committee proceedings during a session where SOGI-inclusive language in key resolutions was actively under threat. The substantive work included opposition monitoring, coalition analysis, policy drafting, and contributing to a joint NGO statement for the 68th Commission on the Status of Women. What’s relevant here is the context: New York during General Assembly season is a particular kind of environment. Delegations, civil society organisations, and advocacy coalitions are all operating in the same few square miles, and the pace of the work requires you to synthesise information quickly, communicate precisely, and shift between institutional registers — from a committee room to a coalition strategy meeting to a briefing document — within the same day.
The coursework complemented this. Studying human rights frameworks and conflict prevention while simultaneously watching those frameworks get negotiated and contested in real time at the UN gave the academic material an immediacy that a campus classroom can’t replicate. It was the semester where the analytical tools I’d been building since my first year at Occidental were tested against real institutional dynamics and held up.
The City
Of all the places I’ve lived and worked, New York is the one where there’s the least tension in the relationship. The density of it — of people, of ideas, of things happening simultaneously in every direction — matched something in how I think. I work best when there’s a lot coming at me and I have to make sense of it quickly. New York rewards that instinct rather than punishing it.
I visited the Metropolitan Museum regularly, and the galleries I kept returning to were the Islamic Art collection — formally the Art of the Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia, and Later South Asia. The collection spans centuries and geographies, and for someone who studies how religion, politics, and identity intersect across national contexts, it was a reminder of the depth and sophistication of traditions that too often get flattened into policy categories. Walking from a fourteenth-century mihrab across Central Park to the UN, where member states debate “religious and cultural values” as though they’re self-evident and static, was a clarifying contrast.
Looking Forward
The roles I’m building toward — in trust and safety, AI governance, policy, and civil society advocacy — are concentrated in cities like New York, San Francisco, London, and Geneva. Every place I’ve lived and worked shaped me differently, but New York is where I felt most like the version of myself I’m building toward — someone operating at the intersection of serious institutions and serious questions, in a city that doesn’t wait for you to catch up. The semester confirmed that: I do my best work in environments that operate at that pace and that level of complexity.