From Sierras to Policy: A Journey into Externalities

I became a development economist because I wanted to understand how the world worked and to make sense of my field experiences as a volunteer in a farming community in the mountains of Michoacán. You don’t know what poverty is until you witness hunger firsthand. I wanted to know how to change the world from a place of reason. Too many things happened between the days I was in the sierras, building roofs and painting houses, teaching in a school with adobe walls and dirt floors, and the day I landed in the United States. I knew I had to move fast, so I enrolled at a community college within days of arriving.

I fell in love with learning, and to deepen my command of the subject, I tutored economics, statistics, calculus, and Spanish. I became very interested in sustainable finance, given my experience in development and entrepreneurship. I interned at Santa Cruz Community Credit Union, assessing community development ventures, and at El Pájaro Development Corp, an accelerator for low-income entrepreneurs in Watsonville. After that, I interned at a boutique brokerage, learning from a money manager how to design a new impact-investment line, which was then called socially responsible investing. Unfortunately, the financial crisis hit, and a job offer was rescinded.

I graduated without work, and my world collapsed. I found work as a bank teller and lived very precariously for several years. I lost hope in myself for a time, and it took a long while to recover.

One day I reconnected with an old friend who had been my calculus student; she was then an executive assistant and suggested I apply to the family office of her CEO. I started as a bookkeeper, moved into accounting, and eventually managed the books and financial analysis for several entities in the fund. That seven-year stretch restored my confidence and gave me a safe place to learn. Over time, however, I realized I hadn’t been growing the way I wanted to. I wanted to gather business tools in a highly competitive environment, but going back to school to retool myself for development was always at the back of my mind. In the last couple of years at the fund, I was offered a path to become a CPA, but my heart wasn’t there. Instead, I pursued a program in development and public policy.

The MDP at Berkeley was love at first sight: world-class lectures, intellectual discussions, stimulating readings, and the endless possibilities of influencing change from many angles. The hardest part was choosing a single focus. My optimal solution was to combine my professional experience with sustainable finance and community engagement as engines for development. But like all chapters, that one ended, and now I am in the job search.

I’m hesitant to apply to sustainable-finance roles. Partly this is skepticism about the real impact that some so-called impact investments deliver. At the same time, as an economist with a public-policy toolkit, I’ve come to see regulating externalities as a more effective path to development than finance alone. That insight has led me to pursue better methodologies for accounting social and environmental impacts of goods and energy production. Lately, I’ve worked directly on measuring impacts from energy production; the process is similar across contexts, using reliable data to build indicators that decision-makers can use in regulation and legislation.

I’m still in love with learning, and I’m searching for an opportunity to harness that passion and knowledge, nothing short of an act of faith.