About me

I like being thrown into new places, and that is probably the fastest way to describe me. Back home I am a junior studying economics, where most of my coursework has leaned toward finance, statistics, and applied data work. Outside of the classroom, I have spent time in data analytics and systems administration, which taught me how data actually moves through an organization, how it gets stored, and, more often than anyone admits, how it gets messy.

The Program

This summer I am interning at a real estate company in Stockholm, where my work centers on financial analysis and data refining. The placement was arranged by Absolute Internship through Pitt, and when I was comparing programs, this one stood out because it sits right at the intersection of the two things I have spent the most time on, finance and data.

A quick word on what data refining actually means, since it sounds vague until you have done it. Financial data rarely arrives clean. It comes in from different systems with inconsistent formats, duplicate records, gaps, and errors, and before anyone can build a forecast or evaluate performance, someone has to turn that raw input into something reliable. That is the part of the job I find weirdly satisfying, taking a dataset that nobody trusts and refining it into something a company can base real decisions on. The analysis side builds on that foundation, looking at revenue trends, costs, and performance metrics to help the business understand where it stands and where it is heading.

Stockholm is also a fitting place to do this kind of work, because Sweden has quietly become one of the strongest financial technology hubs in Europe. This is the country that produced Klarna and iZettle, and it is one of the most cashless societies in the world, so the line between finance and technology barely exists here. Getting to watch how a Swedish company handles its financial data, in a market where digital payments and automation are the default rather than the exception, is exactly the kind of exposure I cannot get from a textbook in Pittsburgh.

So what am I hoping to get out of this? On a personal level, I want to prove to myself that I can function in a new city where I barely speak the language and do not know anyone. Academically, I am curious whether the concepts from my economics and finance courses hold up once you take them out of the classroom, especially in a European market with its own regulations, currency considerations, and business culture. And professionally, I want to sharpen my analytical skills, get hands-on experience with the fintech side of the industry, and build relationships with people who work in it. Everyone tells me Swedish offices have flat hierarchies, and that people actually go home on time. We will see if that is true.

Getting Here Was Its Own Adventure

Full disclosure, this “pre-departure” post is being written by someone who already departed. After wrapping up May in Norway, I was supposed to fly out of Oslo on June 4, but my flight to Stockholm got cancelled, and I did not walk into my hotel until 1 in the morning on Friday. Not exactly the arrival I had pictured. I spent that first weekend practicing my Swedish, settling in, and getting my head right for the internship, fueled mostly by coffee.

More updates soon. Vi ses!