Oh, hey there blog. It's been a while. A year and a half, to be precise. Sorry about that - business school turned out to be a little busier than expected. But now that I'm back in developing country land, it seems only reasonable to start you up again for the moment.
The 5-second update is that I've been in my first year of the MBA program at Duke's Fuqua School of Business for the past 9 months. I'm concentrating in Social Entrepreneurship and Finance, participating in way too many extracurriculars, and taking advantage of every possible opportunity to go abroad. That has manifested itself in a two-week consulting trip to Brazil over spring break, and now my internship at an impact investing firm in Nicaragua called Agora Partnerships.
I'll save the long detailed update on Agora and my work for later, and for now will suffice with periodic random musings about life in Managua. Up first: the fascinating life stories of taxi drivers.
It seems that there are two types of cab drivers in Managua: super sketchy and super overqualified. The other interns and I have been warned over and over about the dangers of taking unknown cabs from the street in Managua (which we do anyway), so it's safe to say that there are a lot of bad cabs out there. At the same time, the economic situation here has worsened so steadily over the past few years that unemployment has taken its toll, particularly on the higher educated sector of the workforce.
The result: people with PhDs driving taxis to make a living. In the past week I've met an agricultural engineer, a doctor, and a dance instructor who spent three years in San Francisco. Fascinating, vibrant people with amazing life stories, but rough times.
I'll pontificate more later on what this overqualification issue means for entrepreneurship and innovation in the Central American economy, since that's what I'm working on every day.
The 5-second update is that I've been in my first year of the MBA program at Duke's Fuqua School of Business for the past 9 months. I'm concentrating in Social Entrepreneurship and Finance, participating in way too many extracurriculars, and taking advantage of every possible opportunity to go abroad. That has manifested itself in a two-week consulting trip to Brazil over spring break, and now my internship at an impact investing firm in Nicaragua called Agora Partnerships.
I'll save the long detailed update on Agora and my work for later, and for now will suffice with periodic random musings about life in Managua. Up first: the fascinating life stories of taxi drivers.
It seems that there are two types of cab drivers in Managua: super sketchy and super overqualified. The other interns and I have been warned over and over about the dangers of taking unknown cabs from the street in Managua (which we do anyway), so it's safe to say that there are a lot of bad cabs out there. At the same time, the economic situation here has worsened so steadily over the past few years that unemployment has taken its toll, particularly on the higher educated sector of the workforce.
Unemployment in Nicaragua
I'll pontificate more later on what this overqualification issue means for entrepreneurship and innovation in the Central American economy, since that's what I'm working on every day.
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