Amaal Abdi, WH ’25, Suwanee, GA
This summer, I had the opportunity to intern at a private equity firm focused on tech and tech-enabled investing. My experience ignited a passion for tech investing, and I am incredibly grateful to Career Services for making this experience possible.
No two days looked the same, but I generally collaborated with the associates on my deal team on a variety of tasks, including researching, putting together PowerPoint decks, and conducting Excel analyses. I also had the opportunity to sit in on deal team meetings, which I found to be incredibly valuable because I got a sense of how my team thought about evaluating potential investments.
In addition to work related to my deal team, I completed PowerPoint and Excel assignments and engaged in a series of accompanying training sessions. Though the training sessions provided a solid foundation of financial concepts and model-building, the assignments required me to learn how to answer my own questions and to also lean on mentors for further guidance. As a result, I developed two critically important skills: connecting and forming a mentorship with those around me and learning how to be self-directed.
I spent the remaining three weeks of my summer completing my final project in which I ultimately pitched a take-private of an education-technology company. The project was exciting because it provided me with the independence to conduct research and analyses as I saw fit, incorporating the information I learned throughout the summer along the way. More generally, I learned how to extract the most important information from broker reports and SEC filings, then synthesize and present that information—along with my own assessment of the company—in a cohesive and logical manner.
Perhaps the most valuable part of my experience was my various interactions with the investment team. Learning how to build a P&L or LBO model is generally standard across firms, but the insights I gained from coffee chats, deal team meetings, or even passively listening to office conversations were invaluable.
This is part of a series of posts by recipients of the 2023 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
