Lorilee Lippincott

I am passionate about finding solutions that help our world become better. I started my career in communications and media and have spent the last twelve years providing communications consulting to organizations around Asia. I have had the privilege of working with organizations tackling challenges related to displacement, child and family rights, HIV/AIDS, education, climate change, human trafficking, statelessness, and humanitarian relief. Working with these diverse projects has given me a broad perspective on the complexity and breadth of the challenges our global society is facing. While I have been honored to assist these organizations with communication, media, and web design, learning about blockchain changed my course.

Blockchain provides new opportunities for global solutions, addressing some of the pain points that haven’t been solvable before. Specifically for nonprofit work, blockchain can provide new levels of agency and transparency, which haven’t been possible with solutions up to this point. Many global challenges are not best solved with continuing external aid but instead could be transformed by creating capacity and financial access within a community—key solutions that blockchain can offer. Learning about this in 2021 was very exciting for me.

At that time, I was convinced that blockchain held solutions that had a much greater impact than the website-building and filmmaking I was providing. I wanted to be a part of how this new technology was going to interact with the world, both towards working to solve these global challenges, as well as to how it would affect many similar issues impacting all of society—agency, freedom, privacy, and safety. However, I didn’t have the background necessary. Nothing from my bachelor’s degree in International Studies from 20 years ago nor my experience with grassroots nonprofit organizations gave me any exposure to coding, international finance, laws, and regulatory concerns. I wanted to be a part of these discussions, but I didn’t know where or how to start.

I found the MOOC on Digital Currencies provided by the University of Nicosia and joined in January of 2022. The first few weeks with Andreas Antonopoulos blew my mind! I was so lost. I spent hours each week researching, doing extra reading, watching videos, and trying to figure out what was in the slides. His classes were the highlight of my week because he was able to explain the concepts so well. I was hooked. I wanted to know more.

I am from the US and Canada but live in Thailand, so I searched all over the world for master’s programs that could give me the knowledge and credentials to move into this space. I didn’t find any other program with the wide range of learning included in the MSc in Blockchain and Digital Currency offered by UNIC. When people think of blockchain, they think of tech and coding, but this innovation is far-reaching and requires diverse knowledge and skills beyond coding languages.

I started the MSc program in the fall of 2022. Every class in the core requirements approached the field from a variety of disciplines and included teachers who were experts in those fields. I got used to being completely overwhelmed by totally new content and working through it until it made sense. The process was very challenging but also very rewarding.

In July of 2024, I completed the MSc in Blockchain and Digital Currency from the University of Nicosia, graduating with a 4.0 GPA. Looking back, these two years have been rewarding and pushed me to grow significantly. It has been one of the highlights of my life and changed my course. Entering this program, I believed in the potential of blockchain’s impact on the world. Now, I understand it on a much deeper level, which is very exciting. We already see numerous applications of blockchain, and its most significant impacts are yet to come.