After finishing my sixth week at my internship and a weekend trip to Helsinki, I am now beginning my second to last week in the International Internship Program. When I began this internship, I had a goal of becoming more confident with communicating with others in a professional setting, as well as becoming more comfortable being seen. This has been an overall theme over the course of my professional development journey. This of course affects how I show up and present my leadership skills. When I was in middle school and high school, I was in Boy Scouts of America. During these years, I learned quite a lot surrounding leadership, and I gained experience across multiple leadership roles in my Scout Troop. Over the course of my seven years in leadership positions in my troop, I developed my own style of leadership from the perspective of my younger self, in order to be the leader that my younger self, and other younger scouts, would want to follow. I have noticed that this mindset in being a leader is the superseding factor I consider before implementing the different, actionable leadership skills that I learned through leadership training. When I first began leading in a small position, I was rather nervous as I had felt as though I didn’t exactly know the processes that we used for teaching those I was leading. As I became more and more familiar after going through planning meetings for each month, organizing logistics for campouts, and signing off requirements for younger scouts, I became significantly more confident. From that experience, I understood how important being a competent leader was for me to feel comfortable as a leader. Now, years later, that same theme is becoming more prominent as I join student organizations and the workforce. As I begin to learn more about potential career paths, skills I need to learn to succeed early in my career, and interact with professionals already in the field, the same competence/confidence themes from my leadership experiences in Boy Scouts are resurfacing. This internship experience this summer has given me the ability to face discomfort while proposing and working on projects that I do not have a large amount of knowledge. For example, the main project during my internship at MyTelescope is to develop a use case for coverage analysts at investment firms to use MyTelescope as a tool. While I do have check-ins with my manager at the beginning of each day, most of the direction on this project was left to be determined by me. At first, I was quite intimidated by this project. I had little knowledge on how equity research operated, or how different industries like music, entertainment, and travel work in detail. The result was leading myself through this project with my best effort. Following my freshman year, I switched my major from Computer Science to Finance, making this previous academic year my first year within the University of Pittsburgh School of Business. I have not taken classes like Intro to Finance or classes that teach valuation methods or how capital markets operate. This meant I had to direct myself to identify what information was important to learn, before dedicating some time to learning these fundamentals in order to be knowledgeable enough to complete a project that is high enough quality to be used by MyTelescope. During this internship, my company switched to being mostly remote due to a lack of desk space in our office, along with many on the team leaving for vacation at the end of June and the whole of July. This experience taught me to lead a project by myself, along with input from the rest of the team at MyTelescope. If I had a question, I essentially was left to use my resources to find a solution as most of the team are not specialized in this area of Finance. For example, I required input to understand what information coverage analysts already use when they evaluate a stock to see if MyTelescope could fill an information gap with alternative data. I reached out to many coverage analysts across the airline, music, entertainment, sports, and travel industries to gain insight. Thankfully, I was able to have a call with an analyst at an investment firm who was able to point me in the right direction. While I didn’t gain too much in person experience leading due to the office being mostly remote, I learned how to be a self-sufficient team player by finding my own solutions.