For the past two years, I have participated in the Academy of Finance, an intensive two-year academic program designed to give high school students a background in accounting, finance, international business, banking and economics. I was selected in my junior year based on my academic performance and an interview. The program itself entails seminars at corporations, interactive classroom lectures, and advanced courses in finance at my high school. .
One of the requirements of the program was to obtain a summer internship in the field of finance. This past summer, I interned at Citigroup in New York City. The particular division was called CGI Finance, which stands for Citigroup Global Investment Finance. CGI Finance is the place where Citigroup receives all the financial statements of Citigroup subsidiaries and analyzes it to make sure that there isn"t any fraudulent numbers, if they met up with their earning forecast, etc. I was very nervous on my first day, but I felt a lot better once I met my supervisor - William Hansen, the Chief Financial Officer of CGI Finance. He introduced me to everyone in the group and I felt a lot more comfortable in the office. Mr. Hansen would assign me different projects, each of which was designed to teach me a new concept like how to use different corporate programs to gather or input information. My most interesting project was obtaining and analyzing balance sheets for a number of worldwide Citigroup subsidiaries. I used my newly learned knowledge to do this task. After I finished with the task, I was asked to participate in a conference in which I had to present to a number of people a summary of what I had found. I had to tell the participants of the conference which company had lost or gained money and what was the total income of CGI Finance. Then the participants of this conference use this information to identify any discrepancies that needs to be solved.