Personal Contributions (Week 6)
This week I am discussing recent personal contributions and a look towards the conclusion of my internship. Graham has provided interns with an array of resources to help us improve. Considering they are a private equity firm with minimal intern retention, their large investment in the internship program is unique. Both our week-long financial modeling course and month-long accounting course were expensive investments to help interns improve.
Considering Graham has contributed to my development, my weekly assignment trackers and these blogs prompt me to think about my personal contributions to Graham. The assignment tracker is submitted bi-montly to the analyst I work for. It is a spreadsheet that tracks the dates I spent working on a particular project, what the project was, who it was with, what I did, and how I can improve. This assignment tracker will be a valuable tool when reflecting on my internship next semester in the internship class.
In the last week the majority of my time was spent creating an overview deck for a company in the early stages of Graham review. This involves a significant amount of research regarding the specific company (RS2 Technologies), the industry (access control software), and the financial breakdown of the company (financial statements, customer/product/vendor purchase data). Learning the language of an industry like access control takes patience and time to understand. The ultimate goal of an overview deck is to briefly but thoroughly describe the details of a company Graham is looking into and how they compare to their industry. A task like this requires gathering content, articulating it in an understandable way, and formatting slides/graphics efficiently.
Sounds like this was quite a project that enabled you to use many of your skills but also allowed you to hone/enhance them and to develop others (e.g. industry lingo, specifics, etc.). It is great that you have the log you referred to, not only for completing the internship assignments this fall but as a record of your work as you prepare to start searching for full-time employment. Having concrete examples you can draw from will enable you to demonstrate to companies where you are seeking employment that you are able to articulate your abilities, see transferable skills, apply knowledge/lessons from previous opportunities, etc. This should prove invaluable.