Reflecting on a Semester of SIRI

After a semester full of hard work, deep research, and countless lessons learned, our work for our client has come to a close. Since the midpoint of the semester, we’ve taken what was a voluminous amount of plans, agenda items, and to-do-lists and sprinted towards a final product that covered a complex global topic with a level of detail and nuance that would not be possible without the hard work of each member of our team. Our project was complex and involved both analyzing a fraught information landscape regarding conflict zones, renewable energy, and credits for the green transition and creating proactive templates for the team to replicate our work to identify future partnerships. Even dividing the work amongst four very capable team members, we had our work cut out for us. By approaching the huge amount of data and tasks in front of us systematically and assigning different members of our team to serve as respective subject matter experts for different regions and industries, we were able to specialize our knowledge and produce final products that reflected the depth of knowledge we had acquired about our field.

What truly made this project so enjoyable was our client. Our point of contact was exceptionally professional, courteous, and helpful, not just assisting us in completing our objectives but actively enabling us to succeed while making himself available to us as both a partner and a professional advisor. From the very first meeting, he demonstrated a palpable interest in seeing our team succeed, taking the time to learn about each of us individually and giving proactive feedback about how we could improve our end result at every stage in the process. When we shared the first draft of our final deliverables with him, he both praised our work while giving concrete and specific pathways to improve in a professional and courteous way. Far beyond the terse feedback one might expect from a busy professional, he dove deep into every aspect of our reports, highlighting specific areas where more detail was needed and envisioning ways we could take the good and turn it into the great. When we presented our final presentation, this constructive criticism proved invaluable as we received nothing but positive feedback, with the client planning to promote out final products on the company website and use our templates to assist the business development process moving forward.

Looking back on this incredible semester, I can pinpoint the ways that working on this project has enabled me to grow both as an academic and professional. Translating academic research into industry research definitely requires a greater eye towards business use cases and actionable intelligence, a necessity that definitely helped me put myself in the mindset of a businessperson rather than a detached academic. What stood out to me as key areas of improvement were time management and effective communication - while my team did excellent work, we sometimes diminished the power of our results with delays to our client team. Moving forward, we’ve learned how important prompt communication is and have resolved to make this a priority in all of our professional and academic endeavors.

All in all, this was a fantastic experience that I would highly recommend to any current or prospective student interested in implementing real-world solutions!