Note: Written in March 2024 for a Southeast Asian Economics course at UC San Diego's School of Global Policy and Strategy — the second policy paper I submitted for the course that quarter, the first being on digital trafficking. Wildlife trafficking generates an estimated $7-10 billion annually and is deeply entangled with poverty, corruption, and the same criminal networks behind other forms of illegal trade. The paper argues that enforcement-only approaches are not only ins

Note: Written in February 2024 for a Southeast Asian Economics course at UC San Diego's School of Global Policy and Strategy. The paper examines what the UN has called a global crisis: people trafficked across Southeast Asia and forced to run online scams — the same scams that flood inboxes daily. The analytical focus is on regulatory gaps and the Cambodia-Malaysia comparison. I've kept the policy register of the original paper intact; this is not a subject that benefits from

A graduate capstone project for a Strategy and Negotiation course, completed in late 2023. The concept was strong. The team dynamics were not. I'll leave it at that Every graduate program has at least one group project that teaches you more about managing people than about the actual subject matter. This was one of mine. The assignment was a strategic analysis and forward-looking recommendation for a major corporation. Our team chose IBM — a company that has spent the better

What drew me to the women and walkability question was straightforward: safety in public space is something I think about, and something that urban development has historically failed to design around. The research is clear — from the age of eight, public spaces are dominated by boys to eighty percent, and girls report feeling significantly more excluded. That gap doesn't close as women age; it calcifies.

Written in fall 2023 for a Politics of Southeast Asia course during my graduate studies in International Affairs. The paper argues that the dominant US-China binary in Southeast Asian geopolitics obscures a third and historically rooted actor: India. The argument begins in antiquity — with the Indianization of Southeast Asian kingdoms — and ends in the present, where India's Act East Policy and partnership-based approach gives it leverage neither superpower can replicate. Leg