Blog 8: Final Reflection

Upon reflecting on my experience these past few weeks, I feel an abundance of gratitude. Gratitude for the people whom which I got to work, for the people who made said work for, and most of all, for the experience I had and knowledge I acquired. 

This knowledge and experience, highlighted by my newfound expertise in excel modeling, understanding of the structure of private equity deals, and ability to read and interpret a company's balance sheet is exactly what I had in mind when crafting my project. With a strong interest and passion for finance and the financial services industry, I felt that an internship at a high level capital management firm such as MAI would net just the results that it did. Additionally, MAI's connection to another passion of mine, sports, made it a near perfect match. 

However, things don't always go exactly as you plan. While I learned lots the first week, I spent the majority of my time just following people around and sitting in on meetings, which changed in the second week, as I was given more real duties to do, but I felt that I was getting the same message repetitively at times in the first week. Additionally, I was able to impress my mentor with my mathematical knowledge in the early days of my project, which led him to believe I could complete virtually any analytical math task he sent my way, oftentimes leaving me with projects that involved complex coding, a skill that I did not know, but was forced to learn along the way. While in the moment, this was an extremely challenging and daunting task, I learned a lot from it and now view it as a positive. 

For rising juniors, who are hoping to have as impactful of an experience as I did, my advice would be to do a project you are truly passionate about. If I was not passionate about finance, and getting to deal with sports and athlete within the finance world, I probably would have hated my project, but I am passionate about it, and found the project fascinating and extremely rewarding. 



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