I went to Milan this past weekend with my friends, we were there for two days. This was my first time using Ryanair and I had to get to the airport and plan out when to get the buses. First I was kind of late packing and getting ready to leave. When I finally left I messed up on the first bus because I did not press the stop button for my stop. I thought the stop would be popular enough to stop anyway but I was wrong for assuming that, especially in the delicate time table I was on. 

I ended up asking the driver if I could get out of the bus on the quayside of the River Liffey in the middle of the city. She was nice and let me out and then I went to the next bus stop. Little did I know, the next bus stop required me to pay 10 euro. It was a mess all things considered, especially because I purchased the wrong bus ticket while I was at the stop so I paid twice. After that whole mess, I finally made it to the airport and got through security no problem. I celebrated with some authentic Irish Burger King. 

I finally got in after my Ryanair flight, which was not bad at all. My bag even fit under the seat which I will note for next time. There at the airport I came to the realization that I was still an hour long train ride to the central train station. I met my friend there and we went out to see the sites. Milan is a very nice city, it has many very old and beaux arts style buildings due to its great prominence in recent history. I recommend visiting Navigli / Porta Genova, the Duomo and interior, the artsy neighborhood of Brera, as well as Sforzesco Castle and the boulevard there. 

After that the next day we went to Lake Como and saw the very beautiful old town. A good heads up would be to book a ferry ride before going because they get sold out. We did not know and ended up instead going up the incline to Brunate village. This had amazing scenic views, including a view of Mt Rosa and surrounding snow capped peaks. Although there was a heatwave, we still had good fun. 

Throughout my time in Ireland, a place I really enjoyed coming back to after the heatwave, I have developed soft and hard skills as a direct result of the activities I have been assigned. Through a series of meetings, I get to ask my supervisor questions about things I am struggling with and to show off my progress on the work she assigns me. This week I was tasked with a few things.

The first thing I had to do was find a way to load a multitude of historical stock prices of defense contractors for specific dates. I did this and automated it to the best of my ability considering the restraints from paywalls on APIs. After that I again used python to, this time, aggregate large data files from a database into one csv file. I am now looking through announcements online pertaining to date time stamps so I can look at the historical prices of defense contractors in a window of time with each date.

I also have been researching the news and media following certain meetings and press conferences. This is the trickiest task yet because of how meticulous and precise my findings have to be, because the financial historical data will be based around these very timestamps that I find on news channels and media postings. There are many soft skills that have been learned from these kinds of tasks, including the understanding of the logic of code, the planning out and mapping of larger week long tasks, and the change in attention to detail when the project demands precision. The hard skills can be thought of as learning more python code, working with very large databases, interacting with financial apis and historical data, as well as getting experience in economic research. This has all been very good for setting myself up with future work back in the United States and abroad, especially if I ever want to work in Dublin, I will have a reference at an esteemed academic institution. Although the job is not finance focused, it has very valuable aspects of finance in an academic and research setting.