09/12/19: Panel Discussion on International Internships

I attended a panel discussion hosted by a member of the International Affairs Scholars Leadership Council, which featured members of the International Affairs Scholars program who had obtained international internships and shared their experience for those hopeful to gain international internships in the future. This discussion featured four former IA scholars: one of them had interned in Portugal for a company, another had interned in the south of France for an international organization, another had worked for the State Department in Washington, DC(this technically wasn’t technically an International internship, but involved International Affairs!) and another had interned for the Canadian Parliament in Ottawa. Through attending this panel discussion, I was able to learn about the various different internships everyone had done and more importantly, how these students were able to get their internships. While some had gotten their internships through personal connections, others had used the resources at Ohio State to get their internships through institutions and programs that were related to their majors, whether it was the Department of Political Science for the Canadian Parliament Internship or the Fisher School of Business for the Portuguese Business Internship. Through this Panel, I was able to learn about more of the countless opportunities Ohio State has to offer. These international internships also helped me realize that studying International Affairs is necessary for any career path as learning about the world helps you adjust and thrive in international settings for any profession you may choose to seek.

09/03/19: The Bioethics Behind Human-Chimpanzee Hybrids

As an Economics and Math major, bioethics is not exactly relevant to my field of study. So, when I walked into the first meeting of the Bioethics Society at OSU, I knew nothing about topic of discussion at the Bioethics Society meeting, which was the bioethics behind Human-Chimpanzee Hybrids. Attending this meeting taught me about a topic I would have perhaps known nothing about otherwise. Very recently, China has begun working on human-chimpanzee hybrids to create chimeras. Chimeras form when human embryonic stem cells are added to the embryo of another species (in this case, a chimpanzee), that would provide organs for human transplantation. Chimpanzees are being used because they are genetically very close to humans, therefore these organs would be very similar to human organs. We were not given a lot of information on this topic, as for most of the meeting, we primarily discussed whether what these Chinese scientists are doing is ethical. At the heart of this discussion lied the consideration if whether these chimeras were actually human and what the definition of being human truly was. Through these discussions, I learned that people have different morals and what is ethical to me may not be ethical to them and vice versa. Since China is the nation behind these human-chimpanzee chimeras, this relates to International Affairs, as people in the United States mostly sees these hybrids to be immoral and don’t condone such experiments, but in China, human lives and organs are seemed to be more prioritized which is why these chimeras have been created. The diversity in the thoughts and morals of individuals from different nations is what makes International Affairs a complex and unique area of study to explore.