“Research is seeing what everybody else has seen and thinking what nobody else has thought.”- Szent-Györgyi
I was initially hesitant to take this class because I believed that a research consulting project would be stifling to creativity. Having previously burnt myself out at a job that lacked creative freedom, I wanted to stay away from experiences that involved too much structure and stringent requirements. This project has instead been a reminder of how deeply creative the process of problem-solving can be. Our team was faced with the task, of identifying relevant companies for a policy, which initially sounded easy but was a mammoth challenge. To solve this problem, my teammates and I learned how to navigate through financial databases, manually scoured through company reports, and used innovative proxies for certain data points to be able to put together the final deliverable. I learned that this is the joy of the process of consulting; you’re given a problem and you have to think outside the box and use your creativity to find solutions While the definition of creativity may have been different than I would have conventionally imagined - In our case, the creativity involved gleaning and interpreting dense financial data - there’s no mistake that it is indeed a deeply creative practice.
This was by no means an easy endeavor. It took us two months to learn how to use financial analysis tools like the Bloomberg Terminal and the Refinitiv Workspace, and it wasn’t until close to the end of the project that we truly managed to come together and build out a deliverable suitable for our client’s needs. We had to persevere through internal disagreements, a strong sense of collective confusion, difficulty communicating our work to our client, and a lack of understanding of what our actions were leading to. What happened at the end was the outcome of true art: a magical coming together of many different unconnected elements to form a cohesive and powerful story. Every single member of our team pulled their weight to find solutions to the various problems that came up. We learned to play on each other’s strengths and weld our different perspectives together to build a consolidated and comprehensive database of companies.
The trademark of creative expression is the sense of fulfillment that you're left with after. This project, which gave me a chance to learn new skills, think creatively, and collaborate with five other incredible minds, has left me truly fulfilled.