My name is Matthew Sumner and I am a rising junior at the University of Pittsburgh majoring in finance, minoring in economics and pursing a certificate in business analytics. I am from a small farm town about an hour outside of Philadelphia and have loved my time in the city at Pitt so far.
The program I choose was the Pitt Global Business Institute. This program allowed me to be placed with a company abroad through the CAPA organization. CAPA placed me with the London Basketball Association. The London basketball Association is a nonprofit that strives to create social change and provide under privileged kids with a solid foundation through the sport of basketball. At the London Basketball Association, I was an accounting intern and worked on a variety of projects.
With COVID-19 switching around and canceling lots of plans it would have been easy to have just spent the summer relaxing. However, I knew that I lacked real world professional experience and knew I needed to improve some of my skills. CAPA and the Pitt GBI provided a great opportunity to do just that even if wasn’t in the traditional format.
More specifically I thought that this internship would be a great opportunity to work on some of my technical skills. In both my finance and accounting classes last semester we had projects that required us to use excel. It quickly became very apparent to me that other students were more comfortable working with excel and using formulas. This experience showed me that I need to work on my excel skills and this accounting internship was the perfect way to brush up on those skills and devolve them further.
In addition to the technical skills, I knew that this internship would be a great opportunity to work on some of my soft skills as well. Working remotely provides new challenges that need to be overcome, and this can only be done with great communication. This includes making sure everyone is one the same page and working efficiently. Also, the fact that this internship is in another county provides a whole other level of challenges and need for good communication. For instance, I am communicating over 3 times zones due to the intern I’m partnered with being in a different time zone then both myself and the LBA. This means I need to have a lot of attention to detail and specify what time zone meetings are scheduled in. Additionally, the people I’ll be working with at the LBA all come from different walks of life and many very different from my own. All of these factors will make for a great six weeks.