Mandana Vakil is a junior at Brown University pursuing a double concentration in Economics and Public Policy. Born in Warsaw, Poland, Mandana has had the experience of living abroad her entire life, while being an American citizen prior to arriving in Providence. She is particularly interested in international economics and development, macroeconomic policy and educational equity and access. Mandana aims to develop quantitative economic skills in devising progressive public policy to work towards the betterment of society. At Brown, she is the Marketing Chair for the Economics DUG and Chief of Staff for the Brown University Crisis Simulation: Brown's Model UN conference for the college circuit. Her interest in education arose through a multitude of extra-curricular involvements. Mandana is an intern at Inventing Heron—a startup that promotes stories about the professional world for young adults in order to inspire them to pursue career goals—where she has worked on developing curricula for RI schools with historically underserved students. Comparing this experience to that as a teacher at The Wheeler School in Providence has made her acutely aware of the discrepancies in education quality and accessibility experienced by students in close proximity to one another and has made her passionate about working towards education equity. This past summer, she interned at LearnLaunch, a non-profit in education technology in Boston, where she conducted an independent research project about the ways in which individuals can get involved in the edtech industry.