Social and Cultural Immersion: Our second week in Milan flew by! On Tuesday we were fortunate enough to see Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper. The Last Supper is one of Italy’s UNESCO world heritage sites, which ensures that it is well preserved. Later this past week, we all visited Verona: The city of love. Stopping at Montresor Winery before heading into the city center, we learned the importance of Verona’s wine making while trying local foods. Along our tour from a Verona local, we got to hear about the history of Romeo and Juliet and climb up the Verona Arena. The architecture throughout the city is beautifully preserved and it was interesting to learn how it’s grid system was built for defense. Experiencing Verona on Italy’s Republic Day was very special and has been one of my favorite travels so far.
Class on Corporate Social Responsibility: In class this week, we continued discussions on corporate social responsibility through debates on various cases. One of these cases posed the question whether it was moral for banks to make a profit on loans. Two groups were assigned their positions and had to defend their sides. One of the pro-profit points was that banks would then be able to extend loans to others more frequently. On the other hand, the against-profit group argued that banks should not make a profit that exceeds what they need to operate and takes advantage of people. On Wednesday, we discussed the decision of Montana to ban Tiktok. We recognized the effect this would have on small businesses and people who use the app as a source of income, but also the risk of privacy issues concerning consumer data. A solution talked about was using a third-party US data privacy medium between consumers and the parent company. It will be interesting to see how Montana will go about enforcing this.
Internship in Milan: This week in my internship at Fin+Tech, I was tasked with researching startups who specialize in AI solutions for banks surrounding risk assessment, anti-money laundering, and other back-office activities. The services of around 60 startups will be presented to one of our partners to help them find solutions for their business practices. I learned a lot about how to efficiently research and cross-reference using platforms like Google, LinkedIn, and Crunchbase. After presenting what we had found to our boss, it was helpful to talk everyone as a team about how we will go about presenting these companies to partners and the evaluation process. I also helped finding a similar solution in AI but for a bank’s budgeting and forecasting operations. I have really enjoyed getting to know my colleagues, and learning more about the Italian culture directly from them.
