Personal Statement: Off-The-Clock In Nicaragua

I am not a privileged white man. As a woman, I struggle with challenges such as unequal pay; limited career opportunities; harassment in every form; and, unfair health and reproductive rights. Being luckily born into a dying middle class, I have had access to education and many life and career favorable circumstances. In Nicaragua, I am privileged, and yet I could not stop feeling hopelessness for a long time. My privileges mean little if they are not used for a greater cause.
I come from a business and finance background. For the over seven years I have been in the labor market, I have worked on different areas of businesses including: customer service, sales, supply chain management, accounting, finance and recruiting. Currently, I lead a family business as General Manager. But the experience I want to focus on is the “off-the-clock” one: volunteering.
I have volunteered for many social causes for most of my life including: academic reinforcement in public schools; building emergency houses with TECHO Nicaragua; and most recently, I am leading a project to collect books and create public libraries in extremely impoverished communities. I have seen the precarious situations that many Nicaraguans face everyday – poverty, inefficient education and teenage pregnancies- and I care.
In July 2015, I
In this fast-changing world, the unacceptable levels of social exclusion and poverty are escalating quickly; and we are running out of time to modernize our systems in order to adapt to the many new upcoming challenges, such as the Fourth Industrial Revolution; a new world order; increasing social and economic inequality; and growing youth unemployment. I am choosing the MSc in Anthropology and Development Management to gain understanding on policies and practices for sustainable development; to comprehend poverty from an anthropological point of view, what causes it and what it causes. I want to obtain the practical tools to become an agent of