Sameer Jain, WH ’25, Naperville, IL
This summer, I worked as an intern at Monarch Capital Group, a long/short equities fund and investment bank based in New York. The firm’s strategy targets small-cap companies which operate in the technology, healthcare, and industrial sectors.
I pursued this internship with the intention of corroborating my interest in a career in financial services and equities investing through practical industry experience. In service of that aim, the nature of my day-to-day work was largely observational. Much of it consisted of accompanying the firm’s investing partners to meetings with management teams of existing portfolio companies and prospective investments, as well as conducting extensive research to remain up to date on developments within the industries in which they operate. Through subsequent quantitative work, I solidified my intuition for the mechanics of financial modeling and developed an appreciation for the ability to translate qualitative observations into meaningful numerical forecasts.
The learning process was organic and generally self-driven as I was given the freedom to guide assignments and conversations in a manner conducive to addressing my questions and curiosities. While the broad objectives for my learning were clearly laid out, I had significant independence when it came to achieving those objectives, and it is in precisely this type of working environment that I feel I am most productive.
Where I ultimately derived the greatest value was in my daily interactions with investing professionals. Beyond the jargon and technical skills, my regular inclusion in these exchanges gave me a sense for how successful people in this industry approach every element of their craft – the ways in which they communicate and what they aim to derive from those interactions, their immediate and long-term incentives for strong performance, and, more abstractly, the role they seek to play in the world of business and the capital markets. These intangible insights have been tremendously valuable in gauging my capacity and propensity for scaling this fascination into a career, and are only fully communicated through live, hands-on experience.
This internship has deepened my interest in investment management and financial services and has reinforced my desire to pursue a career in this space after college. I anticipate the sharpened technical acumen and network of mentors I’ve developed as a result of this internship will be indispensable as I pursue my future ambitions. I’m profoundly grateful to Penn Career Services for providing the financial support to make this experience possible. I look forward to refining and building upon the skills I’ve acquired this summer during and beyond the rest of my undergraduate education.
This is part of a series of posts by recipients of the 2022 Career Services Summer Funding Grant. We’ve asked funding recipients to reflect on their summer experiences and talk about the industries in which they spent their summer. You can read the entire series here.
