OCA Intern Alum: Alekhya Chaparala
Interview by Jesse Wu / Written by Socheata Sun and Kent Tong
WHEN SHE BECAME AN OCA INTERN IN THE SUMMER OF 2017, Alekhya Chaparala traded in the familiar halls of Cornell University for the buzzing streets of Washington, D.C. She was introduced to the internship by a friend who had participated in the program years prior. While she’s had public service experience before—she was a teaching assistant for the Cornell Prison Education System, a college-in-prison program for incarcerated men in upstate New York—she was drawn to the OCA internship program’s focus on AAPI advocacy, something she hadn’t been exposed to before.
For the program, she was placed to work at the NAACP Washington Bureau, whose policy work may not sound relevant to Chaparala’s biology and society major at first glance, but was a good fit as she’d been looking to gain experience in public policy. At her internship, she designed an independent research project analyzing the impact of U.S. foreign aid on African and Caribbean countries, attended coalition meetings and conferences across the capital, and observed advocacy in action. Outside the office, Chaparala immersed herself in the internship community. She bonded with fellow interns over weekly Friday internship programming, happy hours, and excursions to D.C. landmarks like the newly opened African American Museum and the city’s vibrant neighborhoods. “I had never really been in an environment that focused on Asian Pacific Islanders and their shared experiences and challenges,” she recalls. “I found it really interesting to learn from the staff and other interns, and to be part of that community.”
After graduating from Cornell, Chaparala spent a year in India conducting healthcare management research and managed project implementation for studies on India’s public immunization and family planning programs. She worked closely with local data collectors, health officials, and researchers to understand how public health services were—or were not—reaching their intended beneficiaries. Returning to India to work on public health initiatives was a full-circle experience for her, as the primary reason for her pursuit of public service is due to the summers she spent with extended family in Andhra Pradesh, which exposed her to India’s socioeconomic inequality at a young age. Recognizing her privilege of living in America, and as an expression of her gratitude for her living circumstances, she has dedicated her career in service of others.
Chaparala returned to the States in 2019 to work at Root Cause, a nonprofit consulting firm in Boston, Massachusetts, where she consulted school districts, nonprofits, and foundations on projects related to education, health, and workforce development. Her work focused on supporting and empowering a wide array of communities, from the elderly in Washtenaw County, Michigan, to underserved students in Boston, Cambridge, and Somerville, Massachusetts. In 2022, she returned to school to get her master’s degree in public policy and worked as a summer fellow for Montgomery County’s Department of Health and Human Services, producing research reports on the county’s farmers market subsidy program for low-income seniors. During this period, she also returned to OCA, facilitating workshops for the 2022 and 2023 summer interns related to South Asian politics, power dynamics in the diaspora, and caste discrimination.
She earned her M.A. from Georgetown University in 2024 and has been working in development for the state of Maryland's Department of Budget Management ever since. “OCA was my first exposure to public policy,” Chaparala reflects on her pivot from public health. “So, I think it was a really great opportunity.” She encourages future OCA interns to approach the program with the same curiosity she came in with. “Go into the experience with an open mind,” she advises. “It can feel like you have to have everything figured out already, but the internship is really about learning—about your placement, about yourself, and about the direction your career might take.”
Today, when she's not working for Maryland, Chaparala can be found spending her days with her husband raising their newborn child together—another reason to make the world a better, more equitable place.