After graduating in Conference Interpreting and working for few years as a translator and an interpreter from Arabic and English into Italian, I ended up in the Research & Information department of the consulting firm McKinsey in Egypt. There I realized that a career as a researcher was the professional path I wanted to pursue and decided to apply for MESCI. I chose MESCI because its unique syllabus would have allowed me to strengthen my knowledge of quantitative and economic subjects and, at the same time, understand how to apply economics to developing countries. It was a challenging but rewarding year. Classes, especially quantitative ones, were absorbing but not easy for somebody who hadn't had a math class since high school. Yet, professors did a great job in making difficult concepts easy to understand and serious studying at home did the rest. Few months before the end of MESCI, I received a job offer as a macroeconomic researcher for the Representative of the Bank of Italy in Egypt. I was enthusiastic: all those hours of economics and econometrics did bear fruit! Not long after, though, I got and accepted a job offer from BSRIA, a UK-based company specialized in supporting the building services industry worldwide to comply with energy efficiency requirements. I later joined IDC (www.idc.com) where I  am now working as consulting manager contributing to the analysis, creation and delivery of bespoke consulting projects to a range of clients across the ICT spectrum"