Being my last summer as an undergraduate, I followed the trajectory of most third years and applied for a summer internship. Many UVA Thetas end up applying for jobs in New York, and I followed suit. This past summer I worked at Bloomberg LP in the Sales and Analytics program. The program consists of ten total weeks, three in Analytics and seven in Sales.
Most people know about Bloomberg News and Businessweek magazine, but Bloomberg makes the majority of its profit from its Professional Services and Bloomberg terminal sales. The Bloomberg Terminal is a computer system utilized by finance professionals to access and analyze real-time market data. It was one of the original computer devices with live intra-day data creating market transparency for buyside traders. Today, the terminal has expanded to serve both the buyside and sellside, while continuing to expand their news and trading platforms. Bloomberg is an extremely innovative company, constantly reinventing itself with new functions to help streamline the workflow of businesses and corporations in the finance world.
My experience was extremely unique, because unlike many other internships, I was never allowed to open an excel document, retrieve coffee or stuff envelopes. Bloomberg wanted its interns to learn the tricks of the trade. Our training prepared us for our time with the analytics department before moving to an intensive shadowing program on the sales floor. I was assigned to shadow the Buyside Chicago team. They split their working hours in Chicago and New York to ensure clients had all the help they need using the complex computer system.
At the end of the internship, students are judged on a number of presentations they give throughout the summer, the third being a sales pitch to a specific university. My team helped the sales floor connect with the administration at Brown University, while providing a number of creative pitches used to convince the school it needed a terminal. I highly recommend this internship, because, with little prior experience, I learned a great deal over the summer about financial markets. Bloomberg is an extremely well run corporation, and it can help anyone considering decide whether they are interested in finance or business.
By Sara Brown (’15)