MicroTerra is an early-stage startup focused on recycling agricultural wastewater and upcycling excess nutrients to create a sustainable food source while decreasing water use and preventing ocean pollution caused by effluent discharge. I started my internship at a time when the company was in the process of pivoting its business model and I began by working on extensive market research and analysis of the aquaculture and animal feed industries. My work, combined with the efforts of the rest of the team, provided visibility regarding what niche MicroTerra could successfully compete in. I then worked with the team to analyze several different business models and decide which was the most promising and most aligned to MicroTerra's mission. Finally, I built a financial model to project and test different operating scenarios and make plans around capital expenditure. It was exciting to be able to have a significant impact on the company during such an important inflection point in its development and I believe that my work contributed to providing a financial and strategic overview that will help guide the company as it moves to work on executing and realizing the company’s new vision.

The skills and knowledge that I gained during my time at Columbia were crucial to my successful completion of the internship. The skills in the Financial Analysis and Projection course that I gained from the core curriculum filled an important gap in my knowledge and equipped me with the toolkit I needed to build financial models for different business models and scenarios. Classes in strategy and marketing provided me with frameworks for evaluating different opportunities and helped to make my market research work more efficient by allowing me to identify what the most critical pieces of data I needed were and to focus on finding them. Finally, social enterprise classes helped me think about the relationship between impact and profitability and how to optimize both when considering new business models.

This was my first experience working remotely and so was a significant challenge for me personally. Luckily, the MicroTerra team is very experienced with remote work and did an excellent job of integrating me into the team, helping me get to know colleagues and providing frequent checkin points that meant that I never felt like I was working alone. As more work is likely to shift to being done remotely, the lessons I learned from MicroTerra about how to successfully adapt to a remote working model will be valuable, and I believe that I’ll be able to bring many lessons to future teams that I work with.

The internship gave me valuable experience working for an early-stage company, providing me with exposure to high-level strategic questions and showing me how social entrepreneurs use their mission to guide business decisions and, ultimately, the direction of the company. Looking forward, I believe that this experience and insight will be extremely useful if I work for another early-stage social enterprise or if I ever take the leap and start one myself.