Right now I should be reading and creating slides for the competition I’m in, but I can’t focus at all. It’s hard to focus on something that you just don’t understand, especially when you have very limited time to study and try to learn it.
I entered myself into the Women’s World Banking Microfinance Competition. Why? Well, it sounded like a good idea at the time. I’m on a team of six JPMorgan employees (mainly from the Investment Bank) and we’re trying to “optimize the capital structure” for a NGO-Microfinance Institution in Cairo, Egypt (Lead Foundation). I don’t even know what this means, so don’t feel too confused. This makes it even more difficult for me to create the slides (this part is my job) for our presentation.
We started with only a month left before the competition. We have to understand the financial structure of the NGO-MFI, the client base and products offered, the legal structure of Egypt and then try and recommend ways in which to make more money, while reducing costs. Every week we get on a call with the president of the Foundation to ask questions. He’s really helpful, but I have such a hard time understanding anything he says. The accent is difficult and it doesn’t help that I’m clueless to all the acronyms associated with microfinance.
Like I said, most of the people in my group work in the IB. They have created a model, which includes the Foundation’s balance sheet information. They can tweak the assumptions in the model and it will spit back different scenarios to us. How they know how to do all of this is so amazing to me. One of the girls is only 2 years older than me, yet she’s helping to build this model with the more senior people on the team. I give them a lot of credit for putting together the information. It’s quite amazing.
But now it’s my turn to do something for the group…the slides. I told them I was good at powerpoint (which I am) and they were all very happy about that because they never use powerpoint. The only problem is that they are expecting me to understand what they are giving me and then just create some amazing slides for the group. Um…easier said than done.
I’ve been here at work on a Saturday now for about two hours and I’m still sitting here staring at a blank powerpoint slide. So frustrating. I have a very large stack of papers that I need to read for this presentation, but I’m just not sure where to start.
When it’s all said and done, I’ll be happy that I participated because I know I’ll learn something from this experience, but right now I’m really regretting signing myself up for this. I’d rather be at home right now taking a nap.
Here is the website to the Foundation. http://www.lead.org.eg/default.html
