Futsal Fame in Corporate Sydney
About the author: Lise MacPhee ’19 is an FSI Global Policy Intern at the Institute for Economics and Peace in Sydney, Australia. Lise is currently a Stanford undergraduate majoring in international relations.
Apparently I have become the kind of person who gets excited about Monday morning? Here I am on Sunday evening, after returning from some lovely weekend adventures, and I’m excited to wake up at 7am, put on work clothes, stuff onto the train for 45 minutes, and go to work for 8 hours? What?
Maybe it’s the anticipation of finishing up a report we’ve been working on for weeks, or maybe it’s the thought of coding that function that will make it much easier to create the database I’m working on. Or maybe I’m just ready to play in the second game of the futsal season on Thursday. Whichever it is, the point is that I’m excited to go to work — that’s not something everyone can say, and I am grateful to be honestly thinking it.
Just the other week, to illustrate, I was last-minute asked to throw together a brief on the success of peacebuilding for a familiar organization that was heading out on a peacebuilding mission and concerned about the hopelessness in the society they were going to confront. Not only am I proud that the brief was quickly sent off to them with data, charts, and examples that would hopefully bolster the success of their mission (ironically by simply showing that its success was possible), but before I knew it, the brief was also published as an article on IEP’s website (shameless plug: http://visionofhumanity.org/news/successful-peacebuilding-summary-research-findings/) where I hope it can be useful to an even wider audience. It feels great to be putting my education to work, towards the impact I’m striving to make in the world.
I have continued to explore Sydney on the weekends — Royal National Park, ice skating on Bondi Beach, the Spit to Manly coastal walk, even a concert from a fun Australian artist (to name a few things). I was also encouraged to take a 3-day weekend and go to Melbourne where I got to see the incredible exhibition of a family friend, beautiful parks and beaches, and adorable neighborhoods. I am loving exploring this country and appalled at how quickly my time is running out here. Over the last year, I have been bouncing from place to place every few months, and I’d say I’m finally finding myself wishing that I could stay somewhere for a while. I am feeling very comfortable in Sydney and wouldn’t mind sticking around.
The time has flown so quickly that I was astonished to suddenly be the answerer instead of asker of questions as three new interns arrived at IEP over the last two weeks. Sometimes it takes the arrival of new people to make you realize just how much you’ve learned and grown so quickly. I was in their shoes just over a month ago, asking all the same questions, and here I am feeling more comfortable than I ever thought I would after only 6 weeks. I still surprise myself when I code something successfully or catch a subtle but important issue with our report because I’m not sure how this knowledge has stuck over the course of such a short time. It’s nice to feel proud of myself when my supervisors are pleased with my performance as well. However, if I’m being honest, this became most true last week on the futsal court. After 3 years of barely touching a soccer ball, I had jokingly hyped up my soccer abilities a bit too much to my coworkers. When the first game of the season finally came, I was afraid I wouldn’t come through and instead embarrass myself. Turns out it’s like riding a bike — yeah, that’s right, you’re reading the blog of Player of the Match and the scorer of Goal of the Day. Of course, that means I have somehow managed to set even higher expectations to live up to next week. Wish me luck.
