Declan Healey Senior Project

Date: May 20th Today was a very odd day as Henry was at home in New Hampshire and I was at home in Massachusetts. This past Saturday I decided to meet my family at Gettysburg College, instead of flying home with Henry, as my sister had her NCAA Sweet Sixteen lacrosse game there. Since Henry and I were apart for today, we decided it would be a perfect time to get ahead on our final reflections for our senior project. We each worked for about two hours independently on our paper as well as putting finishing touches on the presentation. The rest of the day for me was taken up by some time with my family that I hadn’t seen in three weeks, as well as siblings I hadn’t seen in months. I went to my little sisters lacrosse game and we went out to our favorite nearby restaurant afterwards. The day ended with a solo drive up to the Bechok’s house where I reconnected with Henry in preparation for our last day of senior project tomorrow. Total Hours of Day: 2 Total Hours of Project: 99

Our last week in Maryland was just as hardworking and entertaining as the previous two weeks of our senior project. Kyra came home for the last couple days and so we were able to enjoy the fun with the whole family. Our last week was more focused on wrapping up the project and doing smaller tasks for Laura and ourselves. We started the week with a test of our overall knowledge with a practice presentation for an intern of Laura’s close friend who works for Ashoka, a company that finds and trains future change-makers in the world. This was a great experience for Henry and I because it allowed us to realize the holes in our comprehension of the material as well as get feedback from multiple sources. The same was the case later in the week when we gave our revised presentation to Kyra, who is familiar with a lot of the material as she worked for Laura’s organization FINCA last summer. This past week was also filled with experiences outside of Laura’s teachings that still connecte

Date: May 17th Today was our last full day in Bethesda and Laura wanted to make it worth our while, instead of keeping us inside all day. So Henry, Kyra, and I spent the day in D.C. exploring the last bits of the city before we left in the morning. We started at the Tidal Basin where we went on a paddle boat around the water to see the Washington, Jefferson, and Martin Luther King Jr. monuments. After our hour long paddle we returned to the dock where NFL all-star Landon Collins was shooting the ending of a interview, so that was pretty cool to watch. We walked a ways along until we ended up a Five Guys for a late lunch, before taking the metro back to Bethesda. In downtown we explored some more, went in a few shops, and when we returned home we stopped at Laila’s middle school, Laura’s youngest kid, where they were doing a fundraising car wash. Laura pointed out to us that in a way we were practicing making capital by being involved in the car wash, so we ended up connecting it to

Date: May 16th The morning with a conversation with Laura about what we wanted to do with our day, whether to have a conversation about the online commerce company Alibaba or work with Kyra about the similar work she has done with microfinance. With Kyra back, and her being a former employee of FINCA and Laura’s Social Performance Task Force, we thought it would be a great time to get more feedback on our final presentation. We put our knowledge to the test as Kyra was ready for any mistaken information we threw at her, but I believe it went well for us. Laura was there as well but she was looking for us to refine our presenting skills on our own, with some advice for us near the end. As our days in Maryland are winding down, Henry, Kyra, and I decided to go do some more exploring of the nation’s capital. A newly renovated area called WHARF, which is around a fish market, was our destination for dinner and it reminded me a lot of back home and the fishing market of Gloucester. We en

Date: May 15th The last week in Bethesda is going by really quickly and the days have been focused on tightening loose ends from our research with Laura. We began the morning by reading through three different booklets all in an effort to give us a better understanding for a slide about universal standards of banking. The universal standards were created by Laura’s Social Performance Task Force and the readings gave us in depth analysis and reasoning behind each criteria. After we were done with that we had a long conversation with Laura about the responsibility of banks and microfinance organizations, particularly new client protection standards set after the housing crisis in the United States. Later on Henry and I drafted thank you emails for Kirsten Quigley and Molly Hamilton, who generously brought us in for conversations on entrepreneurship and their startups. To end the day we drove to the airport in D.C. to pick up Kyra, Laura’s daughter, as she returned from her junior year

Date: May 14th Today was a fairly nonchalant day as we did some preliminary research in the morning while looking forward to the main event later in the day. The morning work was a culmination of earlier work on a international cash app named M-Pesa, as we finished a summary of the field visit for Laura’s upcoming Kenya conference. In addition to that we also looked into LunchSkins and the founder Kirsten Quigley, a local startup that we were going to visit later in the day. Kirsten was actually on the Today Show, so we watched her interview and it was cool to hear about the roller coaster ride she has been on since devoting herself to LunchSkins. Coincidently Bobby is dating Kirsten’s daughter so the two joined us at her house and sat in on our business talk with Kirsten. LunchSkins is a environmental company that makes reusable lunch baggies for sandwiches as well as single use baggies made of recyclable paper. The session was similar to that of Molly’s Bakeovers, and it has since