Tenax Strategies recently launched our multi-state cannabis program; the same services we’ve offered for years in Massachusetts, we now offer across a variety of emerging markets in all corners of the nation. It’s been a whirlwind of a month – identifying properties, tracking new developments, working with experts in engineering, architecture, and other technical fields keeps the office busy. Today, I’ve been given the opportunity to talk about my role in this process – and more importantly, how I see my role in the office.

If you have worked with the team, you know us to be tenacious, steadfast, and persistent (true to our name). What you might not see, however, is the work that goes into our products. Behind every strategy, there are countless discussions and revisions, hours of research and testing, and years of expertise.

I don’t have that expertise. For those of you who don’t know me, I’m the current co-op at Tenax. Co-ops are Northeastern University students who take six months to work full-time for an organization in their field. We’re interns, but full-time and a little more committed. In exchange for a slightly later graduation date, we leave the university bubble with superb work experience and a better understanding of how to translate academic studies into real-world results.

Reviews of the program are universally positive, but the individual experiences can vary wildly. For every friend I’ve heard raving about the cool environment, great people, and fascinating projects they work on, there’s one with a horror story to even the scales. Especially in the social sciences, it’s easy for co-ops to get saddled with the invisible jobs: background administrative work, coffee runs, spreadsheets that never see the light of day, or busywork that runs out the clock. In these roles, it’s rare to be heard, rarer still to be listened to, and practically impossible to do things that matter.

I’m proud to call myself a part of this team because I fall into the former category; I love the environment, the people, and the projects that we do. The multi-state cannabis rollout has been the focus of the office for the last several months and despite the growing pains and added stress of a new, substantial project, I want to be clear: at no point have I been given busywork. I’ve proposed and executed everything from data scraping projects to qualitative analyses, built dashboards and analyzed markets, conducted strategic relationship-building and met urgent client needs. More than anything, I’ve been able to identify what needs to be done – and have been given the freedom to do it.

To me, this is opportunity. A mix of freedom, responsibility, and hunger yields the perfect cocktail needed to build capacity. Whether that’s individual, like identifying a resource that could be helpful to a client and learning the software needed to make it, or enterprise-level, like building out national cannabis capabilities – Tenax Strategies seizes opportunity and pursues growth.

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