By Michael Eister (’17)
While still a student at UCLA Anderson, I accepted an internship with a CEO whom I met on a visit to Yangon, Myanmar, one of the several global immersion trips organized by UCLA Anderson’s Center for Global Management. My primary task was to investigate an opportunity to invest in a media organization that the company was considering buying. I quickly determined that the deal they had been working on was poorly structured.
When that project disintegrated, I transferred to the company’s energy team and spent 11 weeks working on complex unit-conversion puzzles, such as converting a million cubic feet per day of natural gas into megawatt output from combined-cycle gas turbines. I taught myself how to calculate the storage capacity of floating storage/re-gasification units and developed strategies to sell gas to the energy-hungry Thai market. Concurrently, we worked on projects focused more on local needs within Myanmar, including efforts to bring natural gas into commercial hospitality and large-scale residential developments.
The office where I worked lost power for a half day at least once a week, and I lived on a street that literally crumbled beneath my feet and flooded easily when heavy rains came. I wore the local-style clothing. While in Yangon, I experienced threats of a strike at the company’s largest operation, terrorist alerts and heightened security checks throughout the city. There were also mysterious warnings from a coworker (who was tasked with ensuring my safety) about government officers’ being on the lookout for CIA agents. At the same time, the tragic Rohingya humanitarian crisis was unfolding in what seemed like a place still very far away from the relative luxuries of Yangon.
One day I was asked by a coworker if I could procure a multimillion-dollar “defensive,” military grade, three-dimensional radar imaging truck. This particular conversation led to a lunch meeting with a lieutenant colonel in the United States Air Force who explained to me the dos and don’ts of international arms dealing. She introduced me to an Israeli individual who filled me in on the players in the local high-tech arms market.
Now I’m considering writing a novel.
On the last day of my internship, I sat down with the CEO who had hired me, and he told me he valued my input immensely and that I was one of the smartest people he had ever worked with. (For those of you who have ever received a rejection letter, you know where this is going.) I didn’t get an offer to return full time. He explained that had he invested in the aforementioned media organization, I would have managed his interest in it.
Part of me still wants to be in Myanmar. However, after several interviews and insufficient offers from companies in various industries, I concluded that, for a generalist, opportunities in this frontier market are rather limited.
I’m now working for a software firm located in a downtown Los Angeles high-rise.
Kyei zu tin ba de, Myanmar.
Read Part 1 of Michael Eister’s reflections on his experience in Myanmar, published in August 2017.
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