Molly Rossi was 10 years old when she first left the United States.

Rossi and her mother flew to Northern Ireland as part of a church mission trip. For 30 years, the region had been marred by street fighting, bombings, and sniper attacks as Protestant unionists and Roman Catholic nationalists fought over whether to remain with the United Kingdom or become part of the Republic of Ireland. While the Good Friday Agreement brought an end to the hostilities in 1998, Rossi said she could still feel the effects in the region when she arrived six years later.

“There was this intense poverty,” Rossi said, “and it was the first time I came face-to-face with people suffering around the world. It was a transformative experience.”

Rossi came home with a burgeoning curiosity about the wider world — an interest she believed made her stand out in her hometown of Franklin, Tennessee, a suburb of Nashville. While many of her friends and family members sought the familiarity of home, she had a growing desire to see and experience as many countries and cultures as possible.

She decided to attend the University of Richmond — after searching for the best international studies programs and earning the Boatwright Scholarship.

Nearly a decade after traveling to Ireland, Rossi went abroad for the second time. It was March 2013, and she was in her second semester at Richmond. She and 10 students and staff members spent spring break in Poland as part of the Chaplaincy’s Pilgrimage program. Together, they explored the history of Judaism and Catholicism in the country, the conditions that led to the Holocaust, and the lasting trauma among the Polish community.

“For anyone who cares about making the world better, I think there’s a moment when you see human suffering for the first time and you have this impulse to help,” she said. “Seeing it firsthand in Poland, opened up this well for me. I could see that [genocide] is still happening today. I had this earnest enthusiasm to fix the world, to change it.”

She decided that an international studies major was too narrow for her. Instead, the threads of humanity and storytelling and repairing the world that had long piqued her interest began to intertwine, and she started to see a future in humanitarian work. No major offered precisely the path she envisioned, so Rossi created her own: an interdisciplinary major in cross-cultural communications. 

Rossi took every opportunity to experience the wider world and find her way to make it better, incorporating travel to multiple countries into her academics throughout her time at Richmond. She honed her Spanish language skills in Seville, Spain, and worked as an editorial intern with the Italian Academy Foundation in Rome. Thanks to a connection she made with an alum in London, she landed an internship with the ONE Campaign in Washington, D.C. And her junior year, she spent a semester studying international criminal law at The Hague in the Netherlands.

It all came together a year after graduation when Rossi landed a position with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), a government agency that provides humanitarian assistance and invests in sustainable development around the world. The role marked a first step towards her dream job: telling stories about and across cultures.

Rossi spent the next six years in various communications roles — many of which focused on explaining to congressional leaders the impact of U.S. foreign aid around the world. Her work took her into the field in Kenya, Rwanda, and Djibouti.

Then, on a December morning in 2022, Rossi landed in Almaty, Kazakhstan. She was assigned to the agency’s Regional Development Mission for Asia as a senior development outreach and communications coordinator.

She spent most of the next year telling the story of USAID’s efforts to promote human rights and freedom in the region with the people of Kazakhstan and neighboring Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. When Rossi completed her assignment in Kazakhstan in October 2023, she moved back to her Tennessee hometown to await her next USAID assignment. Meanwhile, a former colleague from USAID’s Asia Bureau reached out to her about the congressional relations lead position at the International Monetary Fund, which she accepted.

(This story was edited for UR Now. To read the entire story, visit the University of Richmond Magazine.)