Pact Ventures recognizes that classic development model alone is insufficient to solve social challenges and approaches development through the lens of creative financing vehicles and market-based incentives.

As the Summer Associate, I worked alongside the Pact Ventures team on core work, which includes strategic investments, new ventures and partnerships. I spent my time equally divided between three different projects. Firstly, I was involved in the due diligence on the potential acquisition of a US non-profit that has launched two social enterprises in Nepal. Secondly, I helped a portfolio company, which focuses on financial inclusion through giving micro loans to people without formal credit history in emerging markets, to developed go-to-market strategies for two new countries they are planning to expand. Lastly, together with the other intern, we worked to advance Pact Ventures’ impact measurement strategy and developed the team’s first impact report covering Pact Ventures’ activities over the last year.

I think I have leveraged the finance skillset that I have learned from my MBA most during my internship. As I had an engineering major and was a management consultant prior to my MBA, I lacked critical finance skillset that is very important in an investing role.

As I mentioned before, one of the projects I was involved during my internship was the due diligence on the potential acquisition of a US non-profit that has launched two social enterprises in Nepal. Due diligence both on the US non-profit and the two social enterprises in Nepal required ability to understand financial statements of the companies as well as make financial projections and value companies. Thanks to the Accounting and Corporate Finance classes I had as a part of the core curriculum, I was able to complete all financial modeling tasks quite easily throughout my internship and earned appreciation from my supervisors.

Overall, I had a great internship experience with very limited challenges. I believe having exposure to many different project setups and multicultural teams in different countries during my time as a management consultant played a big role in this.

The only minor challenge I had was due to the difference in workplace cultures between Turkey and US. In Turkey, I am used to having close relationships at work and having a bigger emphasis on “team” rather than the “individual”. This is actually quite natural since Turkey has a more collaborative / communal culture compared to US in general. People spend a lot of time with their colleagues during and outside work hours, e.g. go for lunches, dinners together almost every day, have coffee breaks etc. However, I found US working style to be much more individualistic and transactional. I have realized people spend much less time with their colleagues, going out for a lunch together is not that common at all – people usually eat their lunches at their desks. This is reflected in the work itself, too. I felt like there was less collaboration at the work place and more focus on individual’s work. It took me some time to get used to this difference, but it was not a major challenge for me and never affected the quality of my work.

I had a great experience with a lot of takeaways both for my career and the industry.

Firstly, and probably most importantly, I confirmed my interest in social impact and decision to do work in the field down the road if not right after my MBA. I realized that I really enjoy the social impact element in my work and the feeling that I am doing good to someone in the world directly or indirectly.

Secondly, since Pact Ventures is a part of Pact, which is a large traditional development organization, I had the opportunity to have exposure to their work and realized that classic development model alone is indeed insufficient to solve social problems. I confirmed by belief in the fact that market-based solutions are needed in the space and that I want to do impact investing to be able to solve some of the social problems in a sustainable way.