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Wednesday, February 22, 2017

Capable of So Much More

An excerpt from the Atlantic -

Stuck in an American Retail Job With a Foreign MBA
In a new book, a journalist reflects on working as a salesperson in small-town Virginia when he first arrived in America.
By BOURREE LAM

Deepak Singh grew up in northern India. He had a bachelor’s degree in commerce, an MBA, and a job with the BBC World Service in his hometown of Lucknow. Unexpectedly, he met a young woman visiting from western Pennsylvania at a local library; the two fell in love, got married, and decided that Singh would move to Virginia, where she was attending graduate school.

In his new book, How May I Help You?: An Immigrant’s Journey From M.B.A. to Minimum Wage, Singh chronicles his move to small-town Virginia, where he started working a job in retail.* The book reads like an ethnography, documenting Singh’s work experience, his colleagues, and his surroundings, and includes reflections on how the job taught him about American mores and norms. Though Singh was doing minimum-wage work, his book is not a story of poverty, but rather an account of the daily grind of America’s service workers through the lens of an immigrant with an MBA.

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/02/may-i-help-you-deepak-singh/517167/?utm_source=nl-atlantic-daily-022117


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