“I’m actually writing my Undergrad Senior thesis right now, and I’m trying to figure how to intersect my experience at Sanford and my internship experience with finance. I feel like finance and public policy are so often at odds and one feels like they have to control or fight the other. There’s absolutely a way that the two can work together to create something far more effective.
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So I’m writing about forex scams, where people have taken to social media and capitalized on the rise of influencer culture to target women and minorities looking to become financially independent and they pull them into a pyramid scheme hiding as an investment opportunity. It’s taken me a lot of interesting places and I’ve talked to a lot of people, some of whom think they are doing something really good, some of whom maybe have less pure intentions.
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I reached out to a girl in my hometown who had gotten involved in one of these scams and she had gone on Twitter saying, ‘us women we have to stick together, we have to be financially independent.’ When I talked to her she was giving a lot of pushback like, ‘you don’t understand I’m going to do all these things and it’s going to be so great.’ The point of my research is not to tell people they’re wrong but because I knew her, I felt like I had a responsibility to tell her what was going on. That was a weird place to be in research, where you feel like you have an ethical responsibility to intervene.”
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—Isabella Reynolds PPS’21 #HumansofDukeSanford #PublicPolicyResearch #Undergrad