Almost a year ago, I stumbled upon an Instagram post from ETH Zurich about an internship offer for the United Nations Office in Bangkok, more precisely at UNDRR (Disaster Risk Reduction). The 21-year-old, applied Maths master’s student I was at the time, with close to no professional experience, did not think for a minute I had a chance. For some reason I decided to I read the offer and noticed met all the requirements, so I gave it a shot.

I applied internally with the ETH Studios, passed this first screen, then with the UN, got the interview, did the interview, got the position, each step being a complete surprise for me and I still was a bit baffled (and jet-lagged) on my first day in office in September. Everything was new (and a bit scary) to me and the onboarding process was a lot to assimilate.

I would describe this internship as a double way learning and teaching experience: I learned from my supervisors and my team (the Tech & Design team of UNDRR) how a big international agency works, and what current technologies are used in disaster mitigation. In turn, I got to teach them a bit about I learned at ETH: neural networks, LLMs, reinforcement learning… and how these tools can be used in the organisation.

As I was the first ever data and AI intern, I had to build from scratch with minimal resources and no pre-existing workflows. We figured out a lot of things on the go. The arrival of two other new interns at the same position as me, one of whom is also an ETH student, helped to speed up our work.

I primarily worked on two projects: a machine learning based catastrophic model for fragility assessment during seismic events, which I did alone, and a RAG chatbot based on UNDRR, with 3 other people. We were able to deliver working Proof Of Concepts for both, which was a big success given our modest beginnings. I was also the first presenter of a series of webinars about AI related topics, which are still delivered weekly to the entire UNDRR staff to this day. 

This goes in hands with what I would consider as my biggest accomplishment during this internship: planting the seeds of a proper machine and deep learning service at UNDRR (which was the vision our team’s boss had in mind when creating the internship offers). By the end of my six months, the proof of concept opened up opportunities for potential partnerships and funding to continue the work. A new ETH student is also starting her internship right when I finish and I personally see a real potential in a closer ETH/UNDRR partnership.

On a personal level, those past 6 months were an amazing adventure, full of new people from all over the world and travels around Thailand and Asia in general. Bangkok ended up feeling like home and coming back to Switzerland and its 9 million people (half of the population of metropolitan Bangkok) will certainly be quite the change; that and the price of groceries!

It feels like I took off for BKK airport only two weeks ago but in the meantime, the person I am now is fundamentally different from the student who arrived a bit late to work with his brand-new suit in September. I guess this is how growing up feels like.

ETH Studios

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