It's the end of the penultimate week here in Mexico City with MakeSense!

The past week has been an intense week as we prepared to finish and finalise our pitch, however it has also been incredibly rewarding to finally see all of our weeks of work finally accumulate! 

The week began with more work on our project, and a really helpful mentoring session that always lets us see our work from an outsider perspective. This is really useful for adapting our work, and responding to constructive questions and critiques that enables us to improve our research and project.

Having accumulated so much vital research over the past few weeks, it was now time for us to make this into the final pitch. When making the slideshow, I used the storytelling methods we had learnt and gone over to ensure that our presentation was engaging and not just a summary of statistics. I really enjoyed making the first draft of our slideshow, and seeing how all the different areas that we had worked on as a team were all coming together.

Midway through the week we also had another productive and insightful meeting with Hector and some of his Rennueva team. As always, it was incredibly helpful to sit down directly with Hector, and hear his feedback on our work and presentation. Hector has always engaged us deeply in the project, and he gave us new updates and information relating to the project - it is always interesting to see how the project changes slightly by the week!

We discussed the presentation, and even at this late stage we were coming up with new ideas on how to engage the public on our project, and he gave us some more advice on ensuring we engage the audience from the beginning in the pitch. It is incredibly important for all of us that we show this project as more than simply policy work, but as something tangible that can truly change lives. 

Following this, we were capable of completing our presentation, which I was incredibly proud of by the end, and seeing our work come to fruition! 

We finished the week off by giving our first pitch presentation in front of our peers at MakeSense and Laidlaw. This was really rewarding, and I really enjoyed not only presenting our work to everyone, but seeing everyone elses work from the past five weeks.

I am really looking forward to the final week, where we will be presenting our final pitch to Rennueva, but also bittersweet as six incredible weeks draw to an end. I will definitely be doing the most I can to fully make the most of my last few days and time here in Mexico City. Here's to the last week!