What did you do in your fifth semester?
I studied abroad at the University of San Diego. It was a really amazing experience, and I’m actually still in really close contact with the friends I made during that time.

What did you write your thesis about?
My thesis used an agent-based model to explore how gendered hierarchies can emerge within a society and how social structures can contribute to maintaining them.

What are you currently doing, and where?
I currently work at the International Labour Organization (ILO) in Geneva, in the Governance Department, working on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work. Our work focuses particularly on issues such as forced labour and child labour.

My team works on research and policy: we collect and analyse evidence on labour rights, develop data collection instruments and methodologies, evaluate policies, and make recommendations on how governments and other stakeholders can address gaps in the implementation of fundamental principles and rights at work. One of the major projects I am currently working on is the ILO’s Global Estimates of Modern Slavery, which are produced every five years to assess the scale and characteristics of forced labour and other forms of modern slavery worldwide.

I am a junior data scientist, and I work particularly on the forced labour side. A lot of my work involves turning complex information, including legal texts and court cases related to trafficking in persons, into structured data that can be used for research and policy analysis. I also work on the use of data science and AI methods to make some of these processes more systematic. Ultimately, the aim is not just to measure how widespread forced labour is, but to understand the mechanisms behind it and what policies and interventions can help address it.

Did you do something before that, i.e. between PPE and now?
After PPE, I took a gap year during which I tutored children through a private tutoring agency. At the same time, I interned with Graduate Women International, an NGO in special consultative status with the UN that works to promote and advocate for women’s and girls’ education.

I then did a master’s in Applied Social Data Science at the London School of Economics.

How does PPE come up in your daily life now? Are you working in an interdisciplinary field?
All the time. My work is inherently interdisciplinary. One example is the way we think about forced labour. It isn’t enough to ask whether someone is experiencing forced labour; we also need to understand the conditions that make someone vulnerable to it in the first place. That can involve their economic circumstances, their legal or migration status, the institutional environment they are working in, and the power relationship between a worker and their employer.

A lot of the work I do involves bringing those different perspectives together. I might be looking at statistical evidence in one context, legal provisions in another, and the incentives or structural conditions that shape people’s choices in a third. I think that way of approaching a problem, looking at how different factors interact rather than treating them in isolation, is probably one of the things from PPE that I use most in my work today.

What advice would you give to yourself when you were in PPE?
Honestly, I would tell myself not to put so much pressure on myself to know exactly what I wanted to do. When I was in PPE, I was very focused on education and children’s rights, and I could easily have convinced myself that every decision had to bring me closer to that field. Instead, I ended up working in forced labour, and I now can’t imagine doing anything else.

It made me realise how valuable it is to give yourself time to explore. You don’t have to make every course, paper, internship, or job fit neatly into one idea of what your future should look like. Even things that seem unrelated can teach you skills or introduce you to topics you hadn’t considered. Take opportunities because they are interesting, learn as much as you can from them, and give yourself the freedom to figure out what you want along the way. That’s one of the strengths of PPE: it’s broad enough that you can explore very different topics while still building a strong set of analytical tools.

What is your best memory of PPE?
This is definitely cliché, but probably my time in KallioPPE. It was the 2021–2022 academic year, so we were still dealing with the aftermath of COVID, and there was a pretty steep learning curve. I learned a lot about working in a team and about management, but I also have really fond memories of trying to rebuild a sense of community post-COVID. There was something quite fun about organising parties and trying to get everyone involved after such a strange period.

How are you still connected to the people from PPE?
I’m still quite connected to a lot of people from my cohort. I probably see most of the people who are particularly close to me about once a year.

For a while, quite a lot of us stayed in Amsterdam, so seeing everyone was as simple as going back to Amsterdam. Three years later, people have gradually moved all over the place, so that’s less easy now. But there are still occasions when everyone manages to end up in the same place. King’s Day is a classic: people come back to Amsterdam and somehow we all end up crammed into a very small room together. There are also several PPE alumni who have ended up working or interning at the UN in Geneva, so I now have a little PPE network here as well.

What are your plans for the future?
I would like to stay in my current job and keep doing research on forced labour. I’ve really found a passion for this topic. It overlaps a lot with neighbouring areas like anti-slavery work and human trafficking, so there is plenty of room to grow within it.

One aspect I would like to give more attention to in my work is forced commercial sexual exploitation. From the forced labour side, it isn’t looked at enough, and there is relatively little research on it, so I think there is a real opportunity to contribute there.

One aspect I would like to give more attention to in my work is forced commercial sexual exploitation. From the forced labour side it isn't looked at enough, and there is relatively little research on it, so I think there is a real opportunity to contribute there.