Hope you are having a great summer. Time flies and our first year at Tuck is over. Spring term has been wonderful in Hanover. After the cold winter, spring brings life again to town and Tuck and Dartmouth students do all kind of outdoor activities. We had our final projects presentations last week and after a brief celebration I took a flight towards my first destination this summer, Nepal, where I am going to be working in a project related to hydro energy in the country. Despite Nepal has one of the largest potential hydropower capacities of the World, only 25% of the population is connected to the electric grid and blackouts are common everywhere in the country. Decades of internal conflicts and political instability have prevented Nepal to develop their hydropower capacity. Two years ago and after several years of civil war, a peaceful process ended up in the approval by all the parties of an interim Constitution. This Constitution was drafted by Jenik Radon, a professor at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs who has worked in several developing countries. Professor Radon is currently advising the Nepal Government in how to develop their hydro power capacity in a sustainable way and considering environment and local communities one of the priorities.
Professor Radon posted an Internship offer back in February in Tuckstreams, the internal website where job offers are posted for Tuck students. Although I had already secured my “standard internship” in banking in New York for ten weeks, I thought that spending the rest of the summer in Nepal working in this project would be very interesting. I contacted Jenik and things worked out. My background of Civil Engineering and experience in Project Finance helped to get the position and again, studying at Tuck gave me a unique opportunity to work in something that one year ago I could not imagine I would be involved.
I arrived to Kathmandu on Tuesday after a two days trip from Tuck. Once here I was overwhelmed with the amount of information I had to obtain and the challenging project to be done only in four weeks. I recalled one of the strategy frameworks we learned with professor Finkelstein this year to organize our job (Yellowtail case, I am sure all Tuck alumni remember this case…). This framework helps to organize your tasks, classifying them in important vs non important and urgent vs non urgent and I moved forward. This week I have been gathering information and interviewing with different people, from Asian Development Bank workers to lawyers and journalists. Next week the Minister of Energy will receive me and I will probably visit a water project near Kathmandu.
After several days of hard work I look forward to the weekend and getting myself lost in the narrow streets of this amazing city. I will keep you posted of my activities here.
Read the full article: Internship in Nepal