Melina Tsilira doesn’t believe in wasting time. Aged just 21, she has already completed an undergraduate degree and an MPhil, is halfway through an internship at UNESCO, and has four self-published novels under her belt. All in her second language.
Born and raised in Greece, Melina studied Politics and International Relations at UCL, before coming to Cambridge to complete her MPhil in Development Studies at Darwin.
Her research explores sustainable development in Latin America and the Amazon rainforest, and how the perspectives of Indigenous communities and networks differ from those of international development bodies such as the UN.
“Essentially I was trying to figure out what’s being lost in translation – why we’re still not practising the same ideas when we have the same goal,” she explains.
Central to this clash of approaches is a fundamental mismatch in how humanity’s relationship with the natural world is understood. Melina’s work examined the way in which the Indigenous communities she studied view themselves as part of nature, with reciprocal duties and responsibilities towards it and benefits from it. Meanwhile the more widespread view within international development is to see people as separate from nature, and something from which it needs to be protected.
“We don’t translate their ways of living through our official mechanisms, and they don’t have an official mechanism to do that themselves. So my research looked at how we can bridge that gap a little bit, and what foundational changes need to be made.”
While at Darwin Melina was determined to have “the full Cambridge experience”, joining the Punt Club, attending Formals, frequenting the DarBar, and visiting friends in as many other Colleges as possible. She also secured a competitive Cambridge Union scholarship, serving as Women’s Officer.
For the final two months of her studies, while completing her dissertation, Melina was juggling her UNESCO internship, working remotely for the Intergovernmental Hydrological Programme, before moving to France to work from the Paris headquarters.
As if she didn’t have enough deadlines, for the past few years Melina has also crammed very different writing projects into her spare time. Beginning as a teenager in lockdown, she has now written four self-published novels, playing with genres including romance and fantasy, and using a contrasting mental muscle to her academic life.
“I like the process and the release of it – just to see what form it will take, with ideas from my everyday life and different stimuli.”
Following her stint in Paris, Melina will return to London in the autumn to take up a role as a sustainability and social performance coordinator, continuing to work in liaison with the UN. Her MPhil, which she had hoped might boost her employability, seems to have done the trick.
“Lots of jobs now do require postgraduate degrees, especially in the field that I’m interested in. Also my undergraduate degree was very broad, so I wanted to focus it a bit and chose the Development Studies programme at Cambridge.”
