lsbrown

I was fortunate to spend this past summer doing what I love – traveling, volunteering and, of course, working! For the first few weeks, I was in Thailand where I traveled on the weekends and worked full-time during the week at an emerging ecommerce firm. As a data analyst, my primary role was to create business intelligence reports and from my experience, the importance of Microsoft Excel or higher-end data processing tools cannot be overstated if you want to be an analyst of any kind. I also got to meet with a few Wes students and alumni during my trip which was just terrific (as well as my first time meeting Wes students off campus).

After returning to the States, I took a few days off before I began working at a management consultancy firm based out of Philadelphia. This was my first time working for such a company but I grew to love my assignments very quickly and about a month later, I was humbled with an offer to continue working part-time once the school year would start. I have now been with the company for more than four months and plan to continue at least through the calendar year. In my experience, the core skills conducive to success in consulting are research, data analysis and report-writing. The ability to convert fairly vague assignments into concise, meaningful reports, often from scratch, is very highly valued because it is essentially the grunt work that senior consultants don’t want to or don’t have the time to do.

Entry-level consulting is often grueling work, but I was still able to squeeze out some spare time during which I volunteered as a tutor and college admissions mentor primarily for high school students – something which I have also chosen to continue after coming back to school. Of course, not every endeavor was a rosy success this summer – my attempts to learn Mandarin through Coursera have left me with little other than knowing how to count, offer greetings and say some random words which I will probably forget before ever getting a chance to use! But in any case, I think I met or exceeded all of my targets for this summer and I look forward to a terrific (and busy) junior year at Wesleyan!

This past summer, I attended the London School of Economics summer school studying corporate finance and asset-markets. Additionally, in the 6 weeks between the end of school and my departure to Europe I also had the invaluable opportunity to serve as a summer intern at the DL Carlson Investment Group, located in Concord, NH.

DL Carlson is a small wealth/asset management firm (about 10 employees) serving clients primarily in the New England area but also across the United States. On my first day, I met with the firm’s Vice President and we discussed his goal to increase firm’s capabilities in the area of financial planning, specifically retirement planning. For the first half of the internship, my task was to test and evaluate various financial planning software packages and this culminated in a pitch to the portfolio managers with my recommendations.   My work then shifted to assisting in researching financial planning/retirement strategies, with a focus on 401(k) to Traditional/Roth IRA rollovers.

Reflecting back on my experience at DL Carlson, one takeaway was my enjoyment in working in a tight-knit work setting. The team atmosphere encouraged dialogue and collaboration between employees at all times, and also kept the mood from becoming detrimentally serious. However, my greatest takeaway was the importance of the information I was internalizing. Understanding successful strategies in investment management, financial planning and retirement preparation are essential lifelong skills everyone ought to attain before it is too late. I feel fortunate to have been exposed to these topics so early in my life.

Last March, Professor Fred Cohan told me that I had to see the glaciers before they melted in five years and that he just wasn’t going to take me telling the National Park Service “no” for an answer.

Mid-July, I was stranded on a dirt road on the wrong side of the Continental Divide while the Reynolds Creek Fire grew from 1/2 and acre to 4,000 acres, jumped and melted the Going-to-the-Sun Road, and blazed towards my home at the Saint Mary Ranger Station in Glacier National Park. What should’ve been an hour drive turned into a 14 hour detour and when I got home just before midnight, my boss told me that we were not only witnessing history, but we were becoming part of it – and then added that we might only be given 10 minutes to pack our belongings when the time comes to evacuate so I better get on that. I soon loaded what I could into my government-issued truck, and headed for West Glacier, as I drove out of the Saint Mary Valley and watched the mountains I had grown to love burn.

While I was on evacuee assignment, I was relocated to the park’s rural Northfork Area, which requires a 40 mile dirt road to access. My campground ranger training meant nearly nothing to my new duties: backcountry patrols, checking boats for invasive clams and muscles, and using a motor boat to access backcountry campsites. Additionally, I spent a good amount of time on my first day in the Northfork within 10 feet of an aggressive, habituated bear and her yearling, as I attempted to keep visitors at a safe distance while I called for backup (on a radio whose signal was lost in the unique shape of the valley I was in).

When the fire was at 20% containment and we were allowed back in our homes, I came out of Glacier’s Northfork more confident in myself and I am looking forward to bringing Glacier back to Wesleyan.

While I still have not fully processed everything from this summer, I am so grateful to my advisor Fred Cohan for pushing me into accepting a terrifying, challenging, and life-changing experience that made me so in touch with Montana, with the Crown of the Continent Ecosystem, and with myself.  I hope to return to the wild west as soon as I can and hopefully I’ll spend next summer working as a Backcountry Ranger back at Glacier.

If you’d like to get involved in the National Park Service, check out usajobs.gov or the Student Conservation Association (https://www.thesca.org/), or come find me!

This past summer I worked as an intern at the New York Power Authority, and took a night class at Columbia that met twice a week. The class was part of the business department and covered the principles of marketing, and I completed a project on Whole Foods’ marketing campaign. My official position at the Authority was a “developmental intern”, and I worked in the Economic Development and Energy Efficiency (EDEE) department on a full-time basis.

The internship itself was an amazing experience. The first few days were a bit overwhelming, for I was constantly getting introduced to new co-workers, interns, and details about the company and our customers, but I quickly got used to the flow of new information.  I worked for a few different parts of EDEE, including the Business and Governmental divisions, and so I had to be ready to field a variety of assignments. Over the course of the internship, I shadowed EDEE team members, attended key team meetings and took notes/captured action items, assisted in managing contact lists in Microsoft CRM for account executives, ran Business Intelligence reports, updated monthly report for governmental customers, tracked customer communications, and completed a data visualization project that required the use of Business Intelligence, Microsoft Excel, and Microsoft Powerpoint. However, my internship wasn’t solely about completing a large number of tasks. I also strengthened my networking skills, grew more accustomed to a 9-5 routine, and made a number of friends that I am still in contact with.

Despite the fact that I didn’t have a lot of free time this summer, I had an invaluable experience working and studying. I also learned something about myself, in that despite the packed schedule I could complete the two jobs as an employee and student to the best of my ability. If I could give some advice to anyone considering a similar summer as mine, I would say go for it. It may seem overwhelming at first, but the experience gained is priceless.