One of the first events I attended at the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University in 2024 was a discussion on the upcoming Fourth International Conference on Financing for Development (FfD4) in Seville, led by Professors José Antonio Ocampo and Daniel Naujoks. They presented the ambitious and reform-oriented agenda for rethinking how the world finances sustainable development. At that moment, none of us could fully anticipate how much the global political landscape would change in the months ahead, or how those changes would make many of the conference’s priorities even more urgent. At the time, development finance felt somewhat distant from my own professional trajectory, which had been centered on program management and social impact work in Brazil.
Over time, however, that distance began to shrink. After attending several preparatory sessions and eventually participating in the main FfD4 conference, I started to see how closely these debates connected to the issues I care most about: inequality, sustainability, and the challenge of turning good ideas into effective action. As my academic journey progressed, I also realized that understanding policy goals was not enough. I needed a deeper grasp of the financial tools required to support them. Choosing to minor in Sustainable Finance helped me build that technical foundation, giving me new lenses to approach problems I had previously viewed mainly from an operational perspective.
Today, I find myself working on a project to refine a monitoring system for blended finance investments in least developed countries and small island developing states. This experience is allowing me to bring together different parts of my background in ways I hadn’t expected. The core skills I developed over years of managing teams and projects, such as understanding client needs, coordinating complex workflows, and ensuring quality, have proven just as valuable in this new context. At the same time, I am applying frameworks and concepts from my SIPA coursework to real-world challenges, translating theory into something practical and useful, at a crucial moment for the organization and for the sustainable development field.
The SIRI Practicum has become the space where all these threads are coming together as I approach my final months at Columbia. It offers a rare opportunity to connect academic learning with hands-on work, while collaborating with classmates from diverse countries and professional backgrounds. For those of us navigating career pivots, experiences like this are especially powerful. They remind me that changing direction does not mean starting from scratch; it means learning to connect past expertise to new problems and being open to how those connections can shape the next chapter.