I worked at Virimodo this summer. Virimodo is a benefits corporation working tirelessly to achieve the goal of a carbon-free future. It helps NYC residents and property managers understand their energy consumption and carbon footprint. Virimodo’s product offerings include 2 dashboards: Residents Dashboard and Property Managers Dashboard. I led the Property Managers Dashboard product. I analyzed publicly available benchmark disclosure data generated as part of the requirements of NYC’s Local Law 84, which were annual datasets of detailed property energy usage information, including property occupancy type, gross floor area, amount of fuels combusted on site, grid electricity used and steam energy used. Using the data from 2017, I calculated the property carbon emission for that year, and the associated penalties (if any) based on the 2024 and 2030 limits as per NYC Local Laws. I worked with the CEO and the CTO of the company to explore potential partnerships with startups in the real estate industry. I directly managed four interns from diverse backgrounds, recruited through the Career and Technical Education initiative by the New York State Education Department.

I believe that the hree courses that I took at Columbia that helped me the most were business analytics, business strategy, and artificial intelligence. Apart from these three, Analytics in Practice was the one where I learned to develop my professional communication and strategic thinking skills. The hard skills that I had learned at the University helped me perform advanced analysis and gain insightful results. The soft skills acquired by collaborating with students on different projects and participating in co-curricular activities made it easier for me to foster deeper connections with the management team. During my internship, we were building a new dashboard from scratch. One of the major challenges was to figure out the features that we would want to prioritize in the first roll-out of our dashboard. It was a constant trade-off between launching the product quickly so as to not lose the first-mover advantage, but at the same time including enough features to make consumers interested in the product. We faced the challenge head-on by developing a well researched survey questionnaire, reaching out to a lot of property managers (our end-consumers) and our advisors to get a sense of the features that would be the most impactful. We adopted agile methodology and rolled out the first version of the dashboard in an impressively short amount of time. We had four high school interns on our team. I had experience working with and managing people who were undergraduates or above, however this was new for me. I took time to understand the way they prefer to work and to find a mutually comfortable way to stay on the same page and get things done effectively. It was an interesting experience and taught me a lot about empathy.

I’m captivated by the versatile and cross-functional nature of the job. I believe it fits perfectly well with my strength and passion. I feel fortunate to have had the opportunity of working on a product that was still in the creation and development stage and doing impactful work at Virimodo. The 10 weeks also gave me insight into what it feels like to work for a fast-paced and constantly innovating energy tech startup. The internship helped me become proactive as I had to reach out to many people and actively seek opportunities that fit our needs. The internship served as a reminder that we need not restrict ourselves to one function/job at any given company and there is always an opportunity to grow and learn.