The second leg of our semester project, which involves working with a client on better understanding Europe’s new sustainability reporting mandates, has been a source of deep practical learning for me. Part of our final deliverable involves working with financial data from tools such as the Bloomberg terminal and the Refinitiv workspace. Beyond gaining the practical skills to work with these tools, this work has also given me the space to challenge my biases to a great degree, and it wasn’t until our team sat down to prepare our interim presentation that I realized how much the work we have been doing has helped me change my thinking.
Growing up I had no head for finance, and discussions of the stock market would make me doze off instantly. Furthermore, I had worked in the nonprofit sector before coming to SIPA, which I admit gave me a disdain for the for-profit world. The exposure to financial analysis tools through our project has exposed me to the world of equity markets, which has in turn opened my mind to the understanding that change isn’t always created by fighting against a system but can also be done by working within it.
Another key theme of my personal learning in this leg of our project has been to learn to ask for help. To effectively be able to work through these interfaces and extract the data that we needed, we’ve received help from the Columbia technical staff, friends across campus, and the helpdesks. This project has reinforced the idea for me and my team, that there are no stupid questions, and the world is always open for those who are willing to learn. I’m also grateful to have teammates who were able to sit and go through the datasets together, validate each other’s methodologies, and be unafraid to push back if they felt like something was needed that wasn’t already there. The value of working in a team is that many heads are better than one. Working on curating the data in multiple groups working on different platforms, that cross-analyzed each other’s methodology, helped push us towards incorporating more rigor in our analyses and allowed each of us to learn more through the process.