"Everything's gonna be alright"
So it's been way too long since I wrote last...so much has gone on but I'll try to keep it brief! And like Alicia sings...everything's gonna be alright!
Brasil - GLab (Belo Horizonte, BRASIL)
As part of our GLab class (Global Entrepreneurship Lab), my team spent a month in Belo Horizonte, Brasil. Belo is a small city (~3million, yeah, "small city" is relative to San Paolo that has 11million + people!)
Dwane, Kaushal, Adit and I worked with a small digital content distribution startup in Brasil. Our company had about 20 people and the average age of the employees was younger than us! Not only did we learn a lot about working with a startup in Brasil, but we learned about the culture, history, and everyday life in Belo. We worked 5 days a week, basically as consultants, working to solve three main questions to help our company. We focused on identify different strategies of growth our company should take, along the lines of geographical expansion, pricing strategies and organizational growth. We started working on this project during the first semester and this January internship was an extension of that work. But rather than working over the phone with our company, we got to be part of the company for a month! Not only that, but we also got to stay in an apartment, so our team bonded over food, beer, music, and nutella!
During our off time, our company showed us such great hospitality and showed us a lot of neat sites and took us to fun activities. We traveled to a large waterfall a few hours away, and even trekked across the top of the waterfall! We tried our hand at dancing Samba, tried all of the food and drinks, as well as trying to learn the language! We ate so many good foods and I haven't been able to find it here.
We were able to even take a weekend trip to Florianopolis (which is a city in a southern state of Santa Catarina) which has beautiful beaches! We even got to meet our company's angel investor and have a real home cooked Brasilian meal! In addition, we got to meet up with another MIT Sloan GLab team while in Floripa! There were so many MIT Sloan teams in Brasil that it was fun to be able to meet up with our friends in different cities!
Post-GLab Travel (Rio de Janeiro, BRASIL)
After our project ended, we traveled to Rio to check out the sites and took part in the Carnaval activities. Since there were so many other MIT Sloan teams in Brasil, it was great to join up with many of our friends down in Rio. We had over 10 of us sitting together in the Sambodromo for the massive Carnaval parade! In addition to seeing the beaches, we visited many sites and even ran into other Sloanies along the way. They say that Brasil is big, but we managed to randomly run into a few Sloanies at different parts of Rio! All in all, it was a great time and it didn't hurt that we spent our January term in the Southern Hemisphere in 85 degree weather!
Where next?: South Africa!
Now that H1 (the first half of this semester) is almost over, I'm getting ready to head off to South Africa for a 15 day vacation that includes a safari! There's a group of Sloanies who just decided we wanted to take a vacation to South Africa, and we put a trip together. Even though it's not an official school-sponsored trip, we know that we'll carry the Sloanie spirit overseas anyway!
Next time I post, I should have some fun pictures from the safari!














