(Bank of Japan, Tokyo) I walk this empty street/ On the Boulevard of Broken Dreams/ Where the city sleeps/ I’m the only one and I walk alone/
In one of those cosmic accidents, my seat at the alumni LNY dinner was right next to someone who shares all my personal and academic interests (development, asia, microfinance, social enterprise, BOP etc), we have the same major and concentrations, we have the same career aspirations and life goals.
It’s not hard to find people who share my interests in one field or another. Econ-polisci is one of the most popular majors, and to find someone with the same concentration combination isn’t too difficult. If it’s development, I can find plenty of enthusiasts in SIPA (not so much Columbia undergrad), and if it’s microfinance, there are plenty of SIPA kids who do that too in the microfinance working group. If it’s Asia, I can meet them all at Weatherhead or EAS events. But to find someone else at the intersection of all those Venn diagrams is very rare. Even Geoffrey doesn’t share all my interests.
She’s older than I am (about 3 years out of college), which means her career path may hold the key to discovering mine. Her first job was in consulting, which confirms what David and Geoffrey and I have discussed about the optimal route to save-the-world skill-set development. Then she made the transition to buy-side finance, which is impressive without sell-side experience (the classic move is IBD to PE with b-school interim).
But what was strange was that she was also interested in finding out what my perspective of the optimal route to social venture capital was – she got really excited when I mentioned that I had interviewed for a position at a social VC – which makes me suspect that her interest in BOP development is more recent rather than something that had been planned through her career track from the beginning. That’s fine, it’s typical for most people I know in the microfinance circles in New York.
