summer thoughts

i love my internship! 

i am:

• learning a lot about a variety of topic areas:  agriculture, energy, climate change, finance, waste
• meeting and interviewing lots of stake holders:  local, state, and federal government, non-profit, trade groups, businesses, entrepreneurs, bankers. 
• playing financial forecaster.
• dairy farm tour! 
• attending interesting and relevant talks: cool roofs, ties between ag & climate change, germany's experience with the feed-in-tariff, and carbon offsets workshop
• great people, great group.  my supervisor and mentor are super-knowledgable, communicate well, and are very nice.  i'm sitting with one of the most interesting and innovative groups at Region 9's EPA -- its clean energy & climate change office.
• generating, hopefully, useful work products -- papers overviewing the industry, financing issues, and maybe an article. 

i feel like it's given me a good sense of what public policy is about -- translating everyone's interests into a common goal.  also, it's been nice to get a taste of working for the government  -- messy, unfocused but relaxed.  it's been good to be in an organization that is the exact opposite of CR.

i think, though, that i need more structure.  i want to work in an organization that thinks and acts strategically.  and while i'd like to be an expert, i'm not ready for that yet.  i want to be around people who are smarter and more knowledgable than me.  i still need mentors. 

most importantly, i've found some career ambition -- i want to have an interesting and challenging career, not just a series of jobs to finance my life.  that, is a new and exciting feeling for me.