She escaped the Taliban. Now, she’s pursuing a career that will help others

She’s a successful entrepreneur who speaks two languages. She knows her way around the nation’s corridors of power and has led tours around the U.S. Capitol. She can explain the separation of powers as outlined in the Constitution and has shaken hands with senators.

All that is impressive enough for any second-year college student. But for Madina Amiri, it’s incredible. Because she has been in this country for only three years.

When the Taliban took over Afghanistan in 2021, Amiri and her father, mother, brother and sister escaped, carrying only what each could fit in a backpack. Now, she’s a Finance major at Metropolitan State University of Denver and doing so well and impressing so many that she won a Presidential Federal Internship and spent this past summer working in U.S. Sen. John Hickenlooper’s Washington, D.C., office.

The presidential internships were launched in 2022 by the Institute for Public Service at MSU Denver with the goal of inspiring future leaders in public service. Internships are open to students of any major, said Shaun LaBarre, inaugural director of the institute. Each year, the institute chooses four students who “have shown a commitment to a career in public service,” LaBarre said.

Once chosen, students secure an internship in the nation’s capital. Thanks to private funding, interns earn $6,000 for 10 weeks’ work. The institute also pays housing costs and provides a clothing allowance and subway passes.

The selection process is competitive, LaBarre said. “We’re looking for students who represent what it means to be a Roadrunner.” Amiri does that and more, he said, especially in her perseverance. And, he said, “Obviously, she has an incredible personal story.”

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In Hickenlooper’s office, Amiri fielded constituents’ calls, took notes during Senate hearings and briefings and led tours of the U.S. Capitol. Along the way, she collected knowledge of the U.S. government that many college students might envy. “I live here now,” she said. “I want to live here my entire life. I want to know about the government.”

Overall, “It was the best time of my life,” she said.

That came just a few years after what must have been the most harrowing time of her life. With the Taliban in power, Amiri’s father, who had worked for Americans for 20 years, “became scared for his life” and the lives of his family, Amiri said.

They fled Kabul, the Afghan capital, and took refuge in a remote province. An American whom Amiri’s father had worked for eventually arranged to get them out of the country, to a refugee camp in Abu Dhabi, in the United Arab Emirates.

The camp turned out to be a single, enormous building that housed 19,000 refugees, Amiri said. Her family spent a year there, sharing one room. “I could speak English a bit, so I offered to help teach English to the little kids,” she said.

After four months of teaching, she was paid $100. In her backpack, Amiri had packed a laptop, along with her high school transcripts, and the refugee facility had internet access. While many teenage girls might have used the pay to order clothes for themselves, Amiri was thinking bigger. “I ordered stuff online that I could sell to others in the camp,” she said.

Things like headscarves, clothes, combs and toothbrushes. And yes, Amiri said, Amazon delivered them.

Her ingenuity paid off. By the time the family left to come to the U.S., she had turned that $100 into more than $2,000.

Since she had packed her high school transcripts, proof of what she had studied in Afghanistan, a counselor was able to help her to graduate from Gateway High School in Aurora in May 2023. She enrolled at MSU Denver the next fall.

When the internship opportunity presented itself, she applied her usual drive and hard work to the process. But getting selected wasn’t the biggest obstacle she faced.

That was her father.

“Women in our culture don’t move out of the family house until we get married,” she said. For her to live alone hundreds of miles away without permission “would bring shame for my father and my father’s family.”

When she asked her father for permission to apply, he told her to give him a week to think about it. After a week had passed, she asked again. “He said, ‘You can apply. I know you are going to get the internship, but I hope you don’t, because how am I going to manage all the responsibilities here without you?’”

She did get it, of course, and reminded her father he had given his word to let her go. And he did.

With her Finance major, Amiri has her sights set on helping those who remain in her native country. “I want to finance an Afghan student organization to help Afghan women and girls and create online programs so they can learn,” she said.

“I want to take other people’s hand to help them,” she said. “And I want to make my father proud.”

Learn more about the Presidential Federal Internship Program at MSU Denver.