My project in Social Solar primarily focused on building user analytics to generate insights on efficient energy usage trends for New York City residents. Integrating these user analytics with utility bill data, Social Solar can provide its customers with personalized options for choosing renewable energy suppliers and can conduct a verification check if consumers are being overcharged by their utilities. As cost savings are one of the prime motivators among millennials to choose renewable energy, I could contribute to Social Solar’s mission to increase renewable energy adoption by providing user insights and intelligence on gaining cost savings.

Apart from above project, I also spent my summer developing a product roadmap and strategy on how Social Solar could position itself for faster user adoption by creating competitive advantage through partnerships with different utility companies in US and Canada.

Many of the skills I have learnt in my Business Analytics course with Prof. Daniel Guetta were notably relevant to my work in internship. Applying quantitative analytic tools to deal with data helped me make an impact in the business decision-making. I also applied my learnings from this course in visualizing the insights from data using Tableau and Power BI to effectively communicate my findings to various stakeholders.

My experience in Operations Consulting core course, where I worked with companies to devise data-driven strategies, helped me move with greater confidence while designing strategy and product roadmap at Social Solar. I also frequently reflected on the case studies I dealt with in Service Operations Management class with Prof. Medini Singh in trying to create a tangible strategy for user service adoption.

Building anything from the ground up is always challenging, but it is also the most rewarding experience. Building analytics by identifying technical metrics in energy usage that would have the most business impact required unique technical knowledge of energy practices from industry experts and connecting it to an applicable business use case. Often, getting required information about the energy practices was difficult. Social Solar in its very young stage did not have all information about technical aspects. To overcome this, I realized that establishing strong relationships with multiple industry sources across various geographies helped me progress faster. For example, talking with experts from East coast, West Coast and Canada helped me quickly understand the differences in energy practices and adopt a resilient approach which could scale in all these geographies.

This internship gave me a taste of creating data-driven strategies and analytical models for business-decision making and deploying them in practice. It also gave me the autonomy in developing models and strategies from start and seeing them through the finish line. As Social Solar is at a launch stage, it helped me gain quick feedback by reiterating the processes and using different approaches to take a product to launch, measure its performance and learn how to improve.

It also gave me the opportunity to build clean energy cities around me by affecting change at the grass-root level. Interacting with energy experts and customers, I can understand the perceptions of people and obstacles in using green energy. Using technology to overcome these barriers helped me gain a holistic perspective to solve problems using both my engineering and business capabilities. It also enriched my Columbia education by putting to test my skills for driving business practices and operations, gaining competitive advantage and building data capabilities for a business.