I am currently in my sixth week and past the halfway point of my international internship experience in Dublin, Ireland. Since my last post, I have taken on more responsibilities as the head analyst I work under is on vacation for a week, so much of the routine tasks he would do internal to the firm I am now in charge of scheduling and completing, which includes transferring rent data from each property into an excel dashboard so that the C-suite can get a better reading of which properties are gaining tenants and at what rate, as well as where we should better allocate assets in terms of funding for advertising.

Learning soft skills are very critical when it comes to being a candidate that stands out to recruiters when it becomes time to secure a full-time position out of college, especially in a competitive field such as finance. By interning at a company abroad, I have been able to greatly increase my communication skills. Since I’m currently at home instead of Dublin where my internship firm is based, communication is key for navigating the differing time zones and understanding what general times are good for my coworkers and supervisors when it comes to meetings or projects that requires teamwork. Since Dublin is five hours ahead of Pennsylvania, many of our important meetings with investors will occur at early morning hours near me, so I had to set my schedule to be available for these meetings. Another soft skill I was able to learn throughout my internship thus far is dependability. Since the workday in Dublin starts a few hours before I wake up, if I am given an assignment the night before I must make sure it is airtight so that there aren’t any issues that would need fixing. A third soft skill I have improved since starting this internship are my critical thinking skills. Much of the work I have been doing recently is going through differently formatted and ordered excel sheets and putting the data into graphs that someone not familiar with the firm’s dealings could understand. Since much of this excel data comes from agents who aren’t familiar with how to make the data easier to read from my end, I had to learn to be able to quickly dissect the excel documents to understand the stories it was telling me as well as what I would want to portray to the investors.

Hard and technical skills I believe are equally crucial to stand out in a candidate pool when compared to soft skills. The financial field has many different aspects that require the use of technical skills, especially in terms of understanding various computer programs that can be used as tools to analyze data such as Excel, Python, and Tableau. The ability to navigate excel in a way that can automate data creation as well as other functions such as calculations can greatly increase productivity and efficiency as time spent on routine tasks is decreased greatly. I was able to better these skills through the various excel data sheets I was given to create graphs and estimate key financial metrics pertaining to if we should continue to investigate a potential deal with a developer regarding residential properties or if we should move on to analyzing another potential deal if the former doesn’t meet our key metric rates. Another hard skill I improved throughout my internship was the ability to create graphs in PowerPoint using the data sets provided by our agents as well as other external sources. This is important as I learned how to better portray complex data information in a way that people not familiar with real-estate investment can see how well the company is performing so that we are more likely to be able to land investors for the projects we investigate.

The global competencies I had going into this internship have helped me a huge amount in terms of being able to coordinate and work with others who live in a country with a culture different from mine. For example, I was able to adapt from the extremely professional language I used when talking to coworkers in the United States to the more casual but still professional language my fellow coworkers in Dublin use. Another thing my global competencies have helped me with was the ability to coordinate across different time zones and plan so that I wouldn’t miss any important meetings and was always on top of what time which assignments needed to be completed.