Declan Healey Senior Project

Date: May 21st Today was the very last day of Senior Project for Henry and I, and again most of the day was spent apart. Henry stayed at his Dad’s house last night and met with a couple people at Proctor in the morning, so I got an extra hour to work on the final reflection. It took a little longer than I was expecting because it really made me think about every little thing that happened throughout the project, good and bad. When Henry came home we sat and worked on the papers independently, while sharing ideas and thoughts from across the room. I was also able to take a final look over the presentation for tomorrow to make sure we had everything in order. I eventually made my way back to Proctor to check in with Kelly and hangout with friends I hadn’t seen in a couple weeks. My day ended with stops at the Moth night for AP Lang and a quick roam around Innovation Night. Total Hours of Day: 2 Total Hours of Project: 101

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

Date: May 13th Today was the longest work day Henry and I have had so far and it was also the most interesting as well. It started as a normal day at the house doing some refining on a draft of our express fest presentation, that we knew we were going to use later in the day. We were set to have Laura look over the presentation before we left the house for our first stop, but her 30 minute conference call ended up lasting an hour and 45 minutes so we were rushing out the door when she finished. We got to Bob’s office at the MLS Players Association (only to use their conference room) and waited for Laura’s friend’s highschool intern who we were going to share experiences with. We connected our presentation to the big screen in the conference room and went through our journey so far with Laura, Bobby, and Elise the intern. Laura and Elise were very helpful to us as they both asked questions and made key suggestions for us to improve our eventual final product. Our next stop after the

This week of our senior project brought a little bit of the same routine from the first week, but also there were some unique days as well. We continued to research into the depths of microfinance, although this week was more focused on the technology side and the new age of digitalization in Africa particularly. We became more independent with our work this week and also with how we comprehend the information because Laura would have us give a presentation of a case study or presentation that she did not have time to read, so she trusted us to encapsulate the information to her. The work we did at the house this past week was very centered around helping Laura, who has become tight with time in relation to her conference coming up in Kenya in July. Henry helped with correcting registration mistakes, I created a chart for the cover of the field visit component of the conference, and we both made templates for the organizations to fill out about their mission as well as their schedu

Date: May 10th Today was a fairly relaxed day because Laura had prior arranged conference calls for most of the day, so Henry and I were basically left to our own devices. We knew we still needed to make something out of the day so we began to look into our next meeting with the entrepreneur of a company called LunchSkins, which makes reusable and recyclable lunch boxes and bags. By the time we felt like we had become comfortable with the company, enough that we will be confident going into our meeting coming up sometime soon, it became time to eat lunch and take a break. It was a beautiful sunny day so we decided to eat outside and there we enjoyed our dining hall-esque, homemade sandwiches, with a side of goldfish. Henry jumped in the pool to escape the unfamiliar heat and was forced to follow after he sprayed me with pressurized water from the pool cleaner. For the rest of our work hours we got to work on a presentation, that could end up being our final presentation we show at o

Date: May 9th Today was our first adventure with entrepreneurism; a large part of our society Laura has been adamant that we experience. We met with a dedicated woman named Molly Hamilton, who constructed her own baking business named Molly’s Bakeovers. The objective of our meeting was to hear the complete story of Molly and the up and down journey of starting a business of your own. As we dove into Molly’s Bakeovers (both the cookies and the company), we learned common phrases and vocab that comes along with business management like a convertible note, a series A investor, and equity. Laura wanted to stress to us that it can be easy to understand the basics of being an entrepreneur once you know the terminology and principles, but what kids who are entrepreneurial majors in college do not understand the amount of “sweat equity” that goes into this type of field. Sweat equity is the hard work and tears that go on behind the scenes of a startup, where the company is on the brink of c

Date: May 8th The couple days this week have been very beneficial to Laura, as she is dealing with calls on top of calls about her upcoming conference in Kenya. Today was occupied by a continuation of the work I did yesterday with the briefing book for Laura’s conference. Instead of the cover chart I did with company logos yesterday, this morning and afternoon we created templates for all organizations invited to the conference to fill out. Henry and I filled in the social mission and a brief bio for each of the organizations but it is up to them to fill out their schedule and activity information for their field visit. Each organization will offer a field visit during the conference and we are creating this briefing book so the people of the conference can decide which organization they would like to learn more about. As a treat to ourselves, we decided to go to the Redsox game as they were in town for their series against Baltimore. We got to baltimore early so we filled our time

Date: May 7th Today was somewhat unique because there were a couple unplanned events that occurred for Henry and I. It started as an average morning, with work on a basic briefing booklet for Laura’s upcoming Kenya conference. The first miscue happened when Henry’s cousin Bobby called with a flat tire ten minutes away, which resulted in Laura driving to the rescue and Henry and I driving there minutes after to bring home Laura’s car, as Bobby had left and walked to school. We did some more work when we got back and cooked burgers for a late lunch, which followed with Laura needing Henry’s help to revise some typed registration info from a group of Bangladeshi citizens for Laura’s conference. They had written their stuff in capital letters so Henry went to a neighboring house to help with that, as I stayed and worked on a cover chart for the previously mentioned briefing book. I had to take logos of all the financial companies focused on for the conference and group them into their r

Date: May 6th The first day of week two was similar in process to the first week, as we did research of topics that Laura gave us, but this time she had us give her our own summary of what we read about. She is a very busy person, so she does not have time to read every presentation and article sent to her, so she trusted us to give her the critical pieces of the passages. The first report we read was about an organization named Caribou Data, which researches native Kenyans and how they use their available technology when it comes to banking. After our presentation to Laura, which I believe went well, we researched an electronic pay app named M-Pesa. To put it into perspective for Laura, we researched the app in comparison to Paypal and Venmo, which are familiar cash apps for most Americans. These different rounds of research and speeches went in the morning as well as after lunch. Henry ended the day by jumping in the pool, which I followed later with a belly flop or two. Total H

As the first week of Senior Project is winding down, I believe that the experience so far has been an overall success. Laura Foose is a great person who has given up some of her time to help Henry and I dive into a curiosity about money specifically how it managed by citizens globally. As Laura specializes in the international side of microfinance, a lot of our research has been focused on organizations, people, and issues from around the globe, but more specifically women in underdeveloped countries. After a couple reiterations from Laura, I can proudly state that microfinance is a tool for poor individuals to help manage their complex financial lives. Specifically, it works with people that have never had access to formal financial services because they have no collateral or credit history. To go along with our new definition of microfinance, one of the most interesting things we did all week was sitting in on Laura’s graduate class at Georgetown and hearing them give pitches for

Date: May 3rd Today could be considered a transition day as we continue to move onward from the general principles of microfinance. The morning was filled with some self research and an extension of work on a layout for our final presentation. For lunch we decided to go to the mall for a food court meal, each one of us got a different type of oriental food; mine was Panda Express. Back at the homestead, and after a sarcastic request from Henry, Laura allowed us to work on our investment skills by playing monopoly with Grey and Bobby. This game was very intense and there were some unsportsmanlike trades but it was Bobby that came out on top as the savviest investor, and it’s not a surprise because he is Laura’s son. We ended our day of work by finishing the documentary from AP Human Geo that Henry had brought up in a discussion about microfinance on the first day. As we go into the weekend, we are ready to relax and refresh before jumping into week two of work with more of a entrepren

Date: May 2nd When we woke up today, Laura was on a big conference call until late morning so she sent us some presentations to review about our next topic of discussion. Henry and I reviewed a little bit downstairs before Laura was off the call and ready to talk with us. She asked if we were ok with doing the majority of our conversion outside on a walk because her dog Lulu needed to get out for a while. She first asked us to come up with our own definition of microfinance, which is she expects us to be asked a lot when we get back to Proctor for our Senior Project presentation. We had a very good conversation about the future of finance with a new digital era and fintechs (financial technology). There has been a lot of information covered in the first couple of days and I believe we have done a good job retaining the information in discussions with Laura. To end off a fairly easy-going day, Henry and I added a public transportation badge to our hypothetical boy scout sashes, as we p

Date: May 1st Today was a very big day for Henry and I as we got to leave the research behind and explore the downtown of Washington D.C. and all of its diversity. We started our adventure by walking past the Washington Monument on our way to the strip of museums. Our hope was to try and see if we could get into the brand new Museum of African American History and Culture, as it has been incredibly popular, but because it was a Wednesday morning we were lucky enough to get in. The museum was amazing as it represented different eras in African American history, from slavery to the present day accomplishments, and it was cool to see the name of Max Smith’s father at the top of a couple of exhibits. Afterwards we swiftly walked through the realistic displays of the Museum of Natural History before heading to lunch at a local Chipotle. We then continued to our next tourist destination, which was the group of the Lincoln Memorial, the Korean War Memorial statues, and the World War II Mem