"Working for the UN Would Be Pretty Cool": Three Insights from My Internship at UNU Macau

Two years ago, during a casual conversation, a friend asked me what I wanted to do with my life. I said, "Working for the UN would be pretty cool, I guess." At the time, neither of us saw it as a serious plan.

Two years later, as the United Nations marked its 80th anniversary and the United Nations University marked its 50th, I found myself working as a Communications Fellow at the United Nations University Institute in Macau. I was supporting the UNU Macau Milestone Series 2025, a major international event series that brought together more than 500 delegates and 150 experts from academia, government and industry.

Looking back on those six months, what stays with me most is not the number of materials I produced or the events I supported. It is three insights that gradually changed how I understood the meaning of communication, Macau's place in global conversations, and how individual tasks contribute to the collective work of an international institution.

The First Shift: From Support Function to Meaningful Connection

During my interview, my supervisor asked me what I thought communication work was really about.

At the time, I saw communication in a research institution mainly as a support function. I thought the task was to present research findings clearly and make them accessible to a wider audience. However, the work showed me that this understanding was incomplete.

While preparing content for the researches, I began to think less about simply explaining the findings and more about helping people understand why they mattered, especially when they revealed digital divides that could otherwise be easy to overlook.

Communication cannot create people's voices, and it should not claim to speak on their behalf. But it can shape whether those voices are heard, whether complex ideas are understood, and whether people can recognise their own concerns within a wider discussion.

This made me pay closer attention to whose perspectives were entering the conversations around me. It also made me wonder what I, as someone from Macau, might be able to contribute.

The Second Shift: From Observer to Contributor

For most of my life, I encountered social progress mainly through its visible outcomes. I rarely thought about the researchers, organisers and institutions whose work helped bring those outcomes into being.

At UNU Macau, I began to see another side of my hometown. Through the Milestone Series, I heard local researchers and organisers bring their own perspectives into international discussions on AI and sustainable development. I saw Macau not only as the place where these conversations were taking place, but also as a place from which people were actively contributing to them.

That made me more conscious of what I could offer, as someone familiar with the city, its local context, and the ways its communities communicate. I helped connect event communication with local partners and audiences, and contributed commemorative materials that brought together Macau motifs and UN elements.

For the first time, I understood contribution not as leading a conversation, but as helping create the conditions in which more people could recognise themselves within it and take part.

That experience also made me curious about how these many small contributions fit together inside an institution as large as the United Nations.

The Third Shift: From Individual Tasks to a Larger Whole

In my previous internships, my responsibilities were usually concentrated within one clearly defined area. This helped me develop specific skills, but it gave me fewer opportunities to see how different parts of an organisation worked together.

UNU Macau was different. As part of a small team with broad responsibilities, I was given opportunities to work across different projects. The more I moved between different tasks, the more I began to see that none of them existed entirely on its own. Each was connected to a broader process that brought together research, partnerships and public engagement in support of the Institute's priorities.

This also changed how I viewed international institutions.

From the outside, the UN system can appear distant and immense. Its mission is often expressed through broad commitments to sustainable development, equality and international cooperation. From the inside, my experience at UNU Macau offered only a small view of the UN system, but it showed me how broad commitments can be translated into careful, everyday work.

No single action carries the full weight of the institution's mission. Yet the work of a large institution depends on many people carrying out their own responsibilities with care, while understanding how those responsibilities connect with those of others.

What we do may appear small in scale. What it serves is not.

A Direction, Not a Destination

If you ask me about my future plans, the honest answer is that I do not know.

I do not know whether I will return to the UN system after graduation, or what form my interest in international work will eventually take. There are still days when the scale of global challenges makes my own contribution feel very small.

The internship did not give me a fixed career path, but it helped me see a direction. I am drawn to work that connects communication, local communities and international issues, particularly work that helps overlooked needs receive greater attention and allows local experiences to enter wider conversations.

Two years ago, "working for the UN would be pretty cool" was a casual remark. Now I understand it differently. It was never only about reaching a particular institution or securing a particular title. It was the beginning of a question about what kind of contribution I hope to make, a question that I am still learning how to answer.