Monday, September 29, 2008

The Individual Project with the World Bank

The Individual Project (IP) is the final deliverable for the MBA. It can take the form of a research paper or an internship report. It runs from late June until the end of August so it suited for summer internships.
Sourcing the IP is not easy, especially if you have particular interests. The process is the same as the GCP. If you really want something in particular, you really have to go for it and try sourcing your own project. The list provided by the University is decent but doesn’t cover some areas of interest.

I was torn between doing something in the financial services (asset management) or digging deeper into the renewable energy industry, following my GCP. Fortunately, I was offered summer internships in different industries such as asset management, consulting and even not for profit.

After an eventful month of June, I ended up taking an internship with one of my dream institutions: The World Bank. I’m an economist so I always had the World Bank in high regard and the prospect of working in its headquarters in Washington D.C. for the summer was really exciting.

The internship was a really good experience. I worked with the Energy Unit and the internship allowed me to see how people work in the World Bank and how their work impacts thousands of lives throughout the world. It was a great opportunity to meet fantastic and interesting people and to travel in the United States and Canada.

I don’t think it could have gotten any better than this!

Three months later

It has been more than three months since I last wrote on my blog. When I last wrote, we just had our ball and took a class picture. Since then, many things have happened and the only reason I stopped blogging was the crazy pace of the last few months (along with some laziness, I admit!).

Things have changed a lot since the 13th of June. I am now living in London and about to start working in one of the biggest banks in the world. My class mates are scattered all around the globe. Fortunately, there is still a very good community of MBAs in London, which helps making living in a different city much easier.

I have received many emails asking about careers, IP and so forth, so in the next couple of weeks I’ll try and pick up the pace to update the blog to provide some inside information regarding all the issues I’ve been asked.