Pre-Departure

Summer is the name of a season, or the name for a girl. For me, it represents a chance to grow. This summer, I will be interning at a company called Zanox in Berlin. So far, without actually being at the company yet, I have gathered that I will be forecasting their internal revenue and completing operation budgets. To do this, I will be required to learn Excel VBA’s, database management, and some advanced macros in excel. I think that this is a good first step for my steps of being a finance major. I hope that in the future I can work at a bank and be required to complete relevant tasks. In banking, I would need to learn how to model and be effective at completing certain forecasting. Say, for example, I was to help a DCF model evaluation of a company to see whether or not a company s worth investing in. It sounds difficult, right? Yeah, I actually have no idea how to do that… I wouldn’t even know where to start!

This summer will be good. Learning hotkeys and whatnot on excel seems to be a good first step for banking. I’m really excited to not only learn more about my desired field but also to do it in a different country. Banking is an extremely rigid and structured field in America. With an average of a 60 hour work week, banking is tough. Regardless of how much I am willing to tackle the rough life of a banker, I have to take the necessary steps to get there. I’ve been justifying my decision to go to Berlin from this one article I read in the Wall Street Journal. The article stated all the major cities/countries in the world and their unemployment rate. I noticed that Berlin was one of the few cities where the unemployment rate was actually going down instead of going up. It just seemed like Berlin was a very promising city to be in. The more I researched, the more I realized the Berlin was an up-and-coming city.  I have also seen that Berlin is a very hip city! There is a lot of street art and a lot of modern music that proves to have an interesting young scene. I’m very excited to go to Berlin and see what else the city has to offer past what my fingers have typed up on Google.

More to come.