Introducing IBM Corporate Service Corps Team: India 39
“My heart is in the work.” -Andrew Carnegie
I went to Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA, and I always loved the school motto there, “my heart is in the work.” For me, it communicated the essentialness of passion to do, not just good, but GREAT work. These days, as a Googler friend put it, it can be easy to feel like a “corporate drone,” where inspiration and creativity commonly goes to die around red tape and process. Unfortunately, this can also be the breeding ground for demotivated employees, causing the “work to flow to the competent,” and in effect, creating poor corporate culture.
Feeling uninspired in my day-to-day work, I sought out change, and in June 2017, I applied to IBM Corporate Service Corps (CSC). CSC is a highly competitive global leadership program, which deploys culturally diverse teams to work in collaboration with non-governmental organizations (NGOs) on issues ranging from economic development, energy and transportation, education, to healthcare. It’s common for IBMers to apply multiple times to receive their acceptance letters, so while hopeful, I tempered any expectations of receiving one with my first application. However, in October 2017, I was more than excited to announce that I had been offered a place within the program for the 2018 cohort.

In May 2018, I was assigned to the India 39 team, which was comprised of 13 individuals from across the globe, representing countries like Brazil, Denmark, Germany, Japan, Canada, Mexico, and the USA. Every week, we met as a team to prepare for our departure; this included visa preparation (which was a surprisingly long and complicated process), consulting training, receipt of our NGO team assignment, and more. As I progressed through each weekly meeting, my trip to Bhopal, India began to feel more and more real. I became enamored at the prospect of impacting a large community in such a meaningful way, and of course, the adventure that comes with experiencing a new culture in a country that I have never visited before.

Prior to arrival in Bhopal, I had been paired with the Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI), which felt special to me before even learning the project assignment. After such a disappointing result in the 2016 US election, it felt good to contribute to an organization, which had been founded on values that I support. This month, we’ll be working across three of their programs in the Madhya Pradesh district in India to reduce rates of malnutrition, anemia, pneumonia, and diarrhea, specifically across expecting mothers and children under the age of 5. Common to many large corporations, each program has been operating in its own silo since its inception, and we’ve been tasked to leverage our data and strategy expertise to streamline how performance across each program is evaluated on a regular basis. We’ll be looking to identify the common business questions across programs and to align KPIs accordingly, so that policymakers can easily understand what levers they need to pull to ensure the success of each program, from facility infrastructure to education. To quote Ghandi, I’m excited to “be the change [I] want to see in the world.” Wish us luck!

