Esa Tilija ’19

Esa Tilija is a senior from Seattle, WA originally from the Himalayan village, Ramche in Nepal, majoring in Economics and History using an interdisciplinary, intersectional, and indigenous-inclusive approach that combines storytelling and data-driven methods.

She spent her most recent summer interning at Capital One’s corporate office in NYC where she worked on impactful projects with the Credit Risk & Analytics Group. Esa has previously interned as a Lumpkin Fellow at Boston Community Capital and interned at InterIm Community Development Association in Seattle’s Chinatown-International District with a Wellesley Serves Grant. During her junior-year, she received the Linda Coyne Lloyd Undergraduate Research Fellowship under the mentorship of Dr. Linda Williams at the Wellesley Centers for Women, which allowed her to gain first-hand research experience on the impact of social media activism on millennials’ real-world activism and ‘slacktivism.’ Esa travelled to the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe Reservation in Eagle Butte, SD during 2018 spring break where she volunteered with the Cheyenne River Lakota Youth Project and supported on-the-ground Dakota Access Pipeline activism and traditional horse group fundraising. Post Wellesley, Esa plans to pursue a career in the finance industry and to attain an MBA/JD because she looks forward to, one day, meaningfully combining her passions for the outdoors, social justice, and creating sustainable economic opportunities for marginalized communities throughout the world.