Phun with Phake Photoshop (Paint.net)

I was designing my own business cards yesterday, and so I was changing the colors of the UC Berkeley logo. Yeah I know it's kind of stupid because the whole point is that the logo is in the school colors. But...I mean...damn the man or something, right?

Job Pitch

I'm going on the job market!

I wrote up a pitch about what I want to do.  I will probably want to keep editing it a bit.

Investors as well as environmental activists could be more effective if they better understood the pressures corporate boards face from the finance industry. For example, perverse incentives in the financial system may make long term planning difficult.
Corporations should sometimes be insulated from these pressures. I want to analyze how financial incentives influences corporate governance regarding climate change. Then I can help environmental organizations and long-term investors develop ways to respond.  Ways that corporations benefit from managing their emissions may also need to be identified and better publicized to the financial industry.
I'm also interested in improving corporate data management for GHG emissions. These software systems help corporations manage emissions reduction as well as report results to stakeholders such as investors or consumers. These systems always need to be customized for each organization because the operations of different organizations vary so much. As a result, experimentation and iteration is always needed. However, in order for the information to be useful for external stakeholders, these systems also need to be compatible with each other to some extent. For example, managing and reporting the emissions of a supply chain where suppliers have many other customers, can be challenging.

Carbon Commoditization

I am reading a paper that describes my perspective on carbon disclosure and accounting.  Usually I struggle with articulating the implications and difficulties of measuring and reporting corporate emissions so I'm pretty excited to have found something that will help me communicate my interests.  In other words, I found some relevant google key words and jargon!  

Crucially, the institutionalization of carbon reporting as a form of governance relies on a successful project of ‘commensuration’, defined by Levin and Espeland (2002, p. 121) as ‘the transformation of qualitative relations into quantities on a common metric.’

The carbon market is not a naturally existing entity; the commodification of carbon is a political and institutional project, requiring an extensive legal and bureaucratic infrastructure to define and measure carbon units for various activities and gases, allocate and adjudicate property rights, and to establish rules for trading across national boundaries and different carbon jurisdictions.

Kolk, Ans, David Levy, and Jonatan Pinkse. 2008. “Corporate Responses in an Emerging Climate Regime: The Institutionalization and Commensuration of Carbon Disclosure.” European Accounting Review 17 (4): 719–45. doi:10.1080/09638180802489121.

Climate Change Data Management

"To achieve a leadership position in supply chain sustainability, companies should have strong capabilities in data, process and governance" - CDP (Carbon Disclosure Project) - the 2013 Supply Chain Report

Yay! I'm into all those things!!  

Ready to be Mentored

Lately, I've been getting some really helpful advice and connections from persons of authority or just people further along in their careers.  I've come to recognize those people as mentors.  It could just be coincidence or luck.  It has certainly helped that I've gotten better at communicating about ideas.  My definition of a mentor has also evolved to be more inclusive.  This was partly from reading the chapter about mentors "Lean In," by Sheryl Sandberg.  She wrote about shifting the focus to being an interesting person with good ideas rather than having a goal be to get a mentor.  It was also helpful to participate in a discussion about mentors at AdaCamp, which was a conference for women and open technology.  I used to think a mentor would always be someone in some obvious position such as a professor or someone on my own career path.  These days it's never so obvious because everyone is changing careers or has additional interests you might not know about.

There was a more internal change, too.  I feel that I am more open now to accepting advice.  I think I have been waiting this whole time to have more completely formed opinions, perspectives, and ambitions.  I am realizing that in the meantime I may have been avoiding people I thought were potential mentors because I didn't want to be influenced too much.  I also didn't want people to be offended if I didn't take their advice so it was in fact a form of conflict avoidance.

On the whole, I am glad I did that, but I am also excited to be entering a new phase now.

Main Interests

Today someone asked me what my main focus is for my career, and I momentarily forgot.  It occurred to me I need to have a more rehearsed answer for when people ask me this so here goes.

I have several main interests, and they are:

1.) carbon footprinting of banking and financial sector.
2.) decision making, data management, and information systems,
3.) social entrepreneurship

Economics Opportunities

It looks like the NEBR (National Bureau of Economic Research) does a lot of interesting work, and it seems to have a strong MIT affiliation. I applied for a job as an economic research assistant for MIT professor David Autor, who is a labor economist and will be the Associate Department Head of the MIT Economics Department in the fall. He studies the income distributions and skills of workers, amongst other things, and he gave me some career advice.

He advised me to apply to more interdisciplinary public policy graduate programs rather than straight economics programs if I were to apply this year. He strongly recommended working in a developing country on an experimental program through the Poverty Action Lab for a year before applying to economics PhD programs. Now I have a lot of leads to follow, and it's really exciting.

Finding My Strengths

I bought this book Strengths Finder. This is what they found.

Your Signature Themes

Many years of research conducted by The Gallup Organization suggest that the most effective people are those who understand their strengths and behaviors. These people are best able to develop strategies to meet and exceed the demands of their daily lives, their careers, and their families.

A review of the knowledge and skills you have acquired can provide a basic sense of your abilities, but an awareness and understanding of your natural talents will provide true insight into the core reasons behind your consistent successes.
Your Signature Themes report presents your five most dominant themes of talent, in the rank order revealed by your responses to StrengthsFinder. Of the 34 themes measured, these are your "top five."

Your Signature Themes are very important in maximizing the talents that lead to your successes. By focusing on your Signature Themes, separately and in combination, you can identify your talents, build them into strengths, and enjoy personal and career success through consistent, near-perfect performance.

Strategic

The Strategic theme enables you to sort through the clutter and find the best route. It is not a skill that can be taught. It is a distinct way of thinking, a special perspective on the world at large. This perspective allows you to see patterns where others simply see complexity. Mindful of these patterns, you play out alternative scenarios, always asking, “What if this happened? Okay, well what if this happened?” This recurring question helps you see around the next corner. There you can evaluate accurately the potential obstacles. Guided by where you see each path leading, you start to make selections. You discard the paths that lead nowhere. You discard the paths that lead straight into resistance. You discard the paths that lead into a fog of confusion. You cull and make selections until you arrive at the chosen path—your strategy. Armed with your strategy, you strike forward. This is your Strategic theme at work: “What if?” Select. Strike.

Activator

“When can we start?” This is a recurring question in your life. You are impatient for action. You may concede that analysis has its uses or that debate and discussion can occasionally yield some valuable insights, but deep down you know that only action is real. Only action can make things happen. Only action leads to performance. Once a decision is made, you cannot not act. Others may worry that “there are still some things we don’t know,” but this doesn’t seem to slow you. If the decision has been made to go across town, you know that the fastest way to get there is to go stoplight to stoplight. You are not going to sit around waiting until all the lights have turned green. Besides, in your view, action and thinking are not opposites. In fact, guided by your Activator theme, you believe that action is the best device for learning. You make a decision, you take action, you look at the result, and you learn. This learning informs your next action and your next. How can you grow if you have nothing to react to? Well, you believe you can’t. You must put yourself out there. You must take the next step. It is the only way to keep your thinking fresh and informed. The bottom line is this: You know you will be judged not by what you say, not by what you think, but by what you get done. This does not frighten you. It pleases you.

Significance

You want to be very significant in the eyes of other people. In the truest sense of the word you want to be recognized. You want to be heard. You want to stand out. You want to be known. In particular, you want to be known and appreciated for the unique strengths you bring. You feel a need to be admired as credible, professional, and successful. Likewise, you want to associate with others who are credible, professional, and successful. And if they aren’t, you will push them to achieve until they are. Or you will move on. An independent spirit, you want your work to be a way of life rather than a job, and in that work you want to be given free rein, the leeway to do things your way. Your yearnings feel intense to you, and you honor those yearnings. And so your life is filled with goals, achievements, or qualifications that you crave. Whatever your focus—and each person is distinct—your Significance theme will keep pulling you upward, away from the mediocre toward the exceptional. It is the theme that keeps you reaching.
Command
Command leads you to take charge. Unlike some people, you feel no discomfort with imposing your views on others. On the contrary, once your opinion is formed, you need to share it with others. Once your goal is set, you feel restless until you have aligned others with you. You are not frightened by confrontation; rather, you know that confrontation is the first step toward resolution. Whereas others may avoid facing up to life’s unpleasantness, you feel compelled to present the facts or the truth, no matter how unpleasant it may be. You need things to be clear between people and challenge them to be clear-eyed and honest. You push them to take risks. You may even intimidate them. And while some may resent this, labeling you opinionated, they often willingly hand you the reins. People are drawn toward those who take a stance and ask them to move in a certain direction. Therefore, people will be drawn to you. You have presence. You have Command.

Communication

You like to explain, to describe, to host, to speak in public, and to write. This is your Communication theme at work. Ideas are a dry beginning. Events are static. You feel a need to bring them to life, to energize them, to make them exciting and vivid. And so you turn events into stories and practice telling them. You take the dry idea and enliven it with images and examples and metaphors. You believe that most people have a very short attention span. They are bombarded by information, but very little of it survives. You want your information—whether an idea, an event, a product’s features and benefits, a discovery, or a lesson—to survive. You want to divert their attention toward you and then capture it, lock it in. This is what drives your hunt for the perfect phrase. This is what draws you toward dramatic words and powerful word combinations. This is why people like to listen to you. Your word pictures pique their interest, sharpen their world, and inspire them to act.

Speedy Reading

I need to read faster...perhaps with the help of the third edition of Speed Reading, I will.

I am seriously considering changing careers to policy and publicity, promoting ideas and programs I like. I'm not sure but I think I really like identifying priorities and developing strategies for accomodating the needs of multiple groups of people. It seems that I already have a good grasp of big picture issues if the relevant information is told to me, but if I'm to be actually effective in policy as a career, I need to be able to do my own research and that means being able to absorb a much higher volume of material.

Boston Companies of Interest

CEE seems like the kind of policy place I'd like to work at whenever I'm done with engineering...

Citizenre Corp

i'm trying to go through the companies on this list. last time i did a job search, i was not very thorough. the next time, it will be.