Born: Gaborone, Botswana
Lived in: Botswana, Swaziland, UK, and Germany.
Major: Economics & International Affairs
Lame Ungwang, pronounced “Lam-ay”, was born and raised in Gaborone, the capital of Botswana, a relatively large country directly north of South Africa and home to just over two million people. The national language is Setswana and the people are called Batswana.
Lame attended different schools in Botswana up through early secondary school, after which she became a boarding student at Waterford Kamhlaba United World College of Southern Africa (UWCSA), located in Mbabane, Swaziland. She feels attending a UWC was a great privilege that instilled the values she bears today: appreciating diverse peoples and opinions, and caring enough about the less fortunate to actively contribute to efforts towards betterment.
After applying to numerous colleges and universities across the USA, Lame chose to attend Lewis & Clark primarily because of the staff at the international office. As an international student applying from across the ocean, visiting prospective colleges was not an option, but the information and support she received from the international office and current students at the college made her feel confident that she would be welcomed and fit well into the Lewis & Clark community. Her experiences as an undergraduate at Lewis & Clark lived up to these expectations. She cultivated life-long friendships and gained mentors who were willing and eager to teach. Lame took advantage of the many opportunities available to Lewis & Clark; she interned with a consulting firm started by a former Lewis & Clark student, volunteered on and off-campus, and represented the international student community for three years as a leadership member of the ISLC board.
After completing her BA studies at Lewis & Clark, with a double major in Economics and International Affairs, Lame spent a couple of months road-tripping across the U.S. with friends, from Portland, Oregon to Washington, D.C., where she eventually landed an internship that affirmed her interest in “development economics.” She has since relocated to Europe, and is now completing her masters in Development Economics in Germany. She hopes to go into the research field in Development Economics, and contribute to alleviating multidimensional poverty issues in her country and Africa in general. She credits the vigor of her liberal arts education at Lewis & Clark as having equipped her with many of the skills necessary to succeed in this regard, and hopes that she can one day give back so that other students like herself can similarly benefit from the experiences and opportunities she was afforded.