SIRI Practicum Student Reflections
In their own words, students share their reflections on their SIRI Practicum experiences!
Finishing the SIRI project really made me reflect on how much my understanding of sustainable investing has developed throughout the semester. Our team worked on quantifying the financial impact of climate-driven wildfires on insurance availability, and honestly, the process of actually measuring the impact became one of the most meaningful parts for me...
The first time I opened our project brief for the Sustainable Investing Practicum, I never imagined how deeply it would pull me into the living, breathing heart of the Amazon and Guyana’s vast forest ecosystems...
As a student of sustainable development, I used to believe that responsible investment is grounded in ethical motivations and a genuine commitment to long-term value creation, which makes it a key driver of sustainability. However, through this project, I had the opportunity to critically question the true purpose of responsible and ESG investment...
In late 2024 and early 2025, the six largest United States banks, including Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, and Morgan Stanley, withdrew from the United Nations-backed Net Zero Banking Alliance (NZBA), a coalition intended to align global lending portfolios with net-zero emissions by 2050...
Having no prior experience in sustainable investing, I took SIRI Practicum as a way to gain both exposure and experience in how capital flows to companies and projects that make the world a better place...
I did not expect a practicum on HRDD to feel like reading a landscape. As I examined how HRDD takes shape across different industries, I began noticing the quiet patterns...
After a semester of hands-on work, our team progressed through the ARC project from initial concept exploration and framework development to establishing an operational KPI system and a company evaluation prototype...
In recent years, my understanding of sustainability has shifted from one centered on minimizing harm to one focused on creating positive ecological and social value...
When I think about what drew me into sustainable finance, I often return to a pattern I first began noticing while working with UNCDF in Senegal...
What if investing was not just about managing risk, but about reshaping the systems that determine those risks in the first place? That question sits at the heart of the project we are working with this semester.
Our practicum aims to explore the mechanism in which extreme climate events shock the financial system. We focus on a specific chain: how the recent LA wildfires impacted the insurance market, then ultimately affected the value of the S&P 500 index portfolio. By mapping this specific risk transmission mechanism, we hope to uncover economic incentives to promote effective climate action.
Over the past few weeks, I have been working on a practicum project that explores how graduate students can navigate the job market more intentionally by accessing better information about corporate behavior...