Please introduce yourself. 

My name is Michelle Dong and to briefly introduce myself, I’m working as an economic consultant for the Social Protection & Jobs Team of the World Bank (WB). Also, I just started working as an impact evaluation specialist consultant remotely for the Asian Development Bank. My general tasks are working at an international organization on site as a member of staff. I did my master’s as well as Ph.D. in Development Policy at KDI School, which shows how much I love our school! 

What made you choose KDI School?

I was studying abroad in Geneva in 2009 as an exchange student. During my year in Geneva, I got to intern at a UN agency, and I got to meet a lot of people who worked at international organizations, which led me to be more interested in international law especially related to refugee rights. So, after college, I started working on a pro bono team of a law firm in Korea to help asylum seekers coming from Myanmar, Bangladesh and Pakistan to obtain refugee status in Korea. While interviewing asylum seekers and listening to their stories, even though this was also meaning work, I felt that helping them get refugee status is only a temporary solution. I wanted to make a more sustainable impact in their home countries which led me to study development policy at KDI School.  

How has KDI School helped you to pursue your career path?

I took an aid effectiveness course, and during the course, we discussed and read about the pros and cons of development assistance and many development projects. That led me to be interested in this research question of how we can better deliver public goods in developing countries, including education and health. And at the same time, I came across the term ‘impact evaluation’. There was a workshop going on about impact evaluation at KDI School at that time, and it made me wonder if impact evaluation could provide the answer to my research question. 

Can you introduce more on impact evaluation?

This is a method increasingly used very popular in development economics to answer the question - what is the effect of an intervention on a pre-specified outcome of interests? The most common way of evaluating a project would be using randomized control trial, which means randomly assigning some individuals to participate or not participate in a program. Even though people in a control group might not be happy about this design, the key aspect of this randomized control trial is that we are randomly assigning if a person will participate in the program or not. I became fascinated about this impact evaluating work thanks to the workshop that KDI School provided.

Why did you decide to apply for the World Bank?

I really enjoyed working at 3IE, but I also felt that I wanted to be involved in an ongoing impact evaluation from project conception to the project closing and dissemination stage, and communicating with the policymakers on the findings. That is why I applied to the World Bank,  and I had the opportunity to work on site in the headquarters for two years in the Development Impact Evaluation Team  of the research group of the WB. We evaluate not tested project, policy-relevant research topics and scalability.

Can you introduce some project that you have participated in?

First is the Nepal Sunaula Hazar Din Project, which means “First 1000 Days of Children.” This is a critical period that affects a child’s nutrition, as well as their education and labor market outcome throughout their life. One of the problems we wanted to address through this project was the high malnutrition rate in the population. This is a multifaceted problem. There are individual factors such as the feeding practice adopted by the mothers that might affect the malnutrition as well as the community factors, including water, sanitation and use of toilets. Therefore, one innovative way we took was a rapid results approach, also called community driven development approach. This is where community members collectively select and work on an activity to address malnutrition every 100 days. 

Why did you start a Ph.D. at KDI School and what did you get from this experience? Or: what did you gain from this experience?

As much as I enjoyed being involved in these impact evaluation projects, I also felt a need to learn about the rigorous methodology and econometric tools to really translate these research findings into development ideas that can be communicated to the policymakers. 

During the first year of my Ph.D., I was invited by my advisor to be part of two rural community development projects in Myanmar and Cambodia, and we mainly trained the enumerators on our project and also the questionnaire. We also conducted lab in the field experiment. Through this experience I was able to gain hands-on experience in the field. In addition, by taking great coursework and by the process of writing my dissertation, I was able to really learn the rigorous methodology to conduct research. 

Why did you get to love development economics?

I get to meet passionate people like policymakers who really want to make change in their country, as well as enumerators and also by interviewing households. Listening to their stories is the most fascinating part of this work when I go to the field. The beauty of empirical research, impact evaluation research, is that we can also see behind the data and we can try to link these stories with the data set. Then, we can also be part in answering this question on how to better deliver public goods, including health and education, for poor people in developing countries.

Can you give some advice for students?

First, gain field experience in developing countries and try to find out where your passion is, where you can make the most contribution. Once you find that area, try to build the skills that are needed to actually make changes. For me, that was research and conducting and evaluating development projects. But there are tons of different ways in which you can contribute, including becoming an engineer who can work on water and transport or becoming a lawyer who can actually help set up the rules in the country, or working for an NGO to run these development projects on the ground. I am sure each and every one of you have your own path that you can follow.