Two Harvard Graduate School of Design students, Andrew Wade and Ana Daniela Rodriguez (both MDes ’18), have been awarded a scholarship from the Pension Real Estate Association (PREA) for the 2017–18 academic year. The scholarship is awarded annually to promising graduate and undergraduate students majoring or concentrating in real estate studies in the United States, with nine students nationwide receiving the honor this year. In addition to a cash prize, recipients are invited to PREA’s 27th Annual Institutional Investor Conference, held in Chicago this October.
Wade and Rodriguez are both second-year students in the Master in Design Studies (MDes) program’s Real Estate and the Built Environment (REBE) concentration. They credit the REBE program with providing a critical understanding of the use value and exchange value of real property and the interconnection between finance and design, they say, and in doing so revealing a new landscape of career opportunities.
Rodriguez earned a Master of Science in Construction Management from Florida International University and a Bachelor of Science in Architecture from Philadelphia University before she came to the GSD. She spent the most recent summer in San Francisco as an assistant development manager with FivePoint, a real estate developer of mixed–use, master–planned communities in coastal California.
Prior to studying at the GSD real estate program, Wade earned a Master of Science in Development Planning from University College London and a Bachelor of Science in Architecture from McGill University. He spent the summer as a financial analyst with Blue Hawk Investments, a private equity real estate development firm based in Newton, Massachusetts.
Real Estate and the Built Environment (REBE) is one of eight concentrations in the GSD’s Master in Design Studies program. It prepares graduates for professional and academic careers in real estate and the built environment as thought leaders and decision-makers in real estate development, investment, construction and financing of increasingly complex environments and future cities. The program is anchored by the belief that economic, aesthetic, and sustainable real estate values are created through a thoughtful process to confront, harness and integrate building form, typology, design thinking, financing innovation, and development. In addition to rich course offerings at the GSD, students take courses at Harvard Law School, Harvard Business School, the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, and MIT.