Helen Zheng, WH ’27, Gulf Breeze, FL
This summer, I had the incredible opportunity to intern at Fidelity Investments, under their SAI Funds department as a Data Strategy analyst where I expected to apply a plethora of my financial and data analytics knowledge on a certain fund. This experience and the vast network of friends and professionals I’ve made throughout my first corporate summer was made possible by the support of UPenn’s Summer Funding program allowing me to fully immerse myself in the role and engage with the team.
Coming into the internship, I realized that I had misinterpreted my responsibilities – while I thought I would work in R and analyze financial analytics – my team were more tech-focused and assigned me a project to build out a process/application that would bring in and replicate functions of a current outside vendor to streamline a new product upbringing.
In the beginning, I was skeptical of my abilities since my co-interns were all computer science and data science double majors while I was just pursuing a data science minor. I also had little to none coding experience (besides CIS1100) and feared that I was falling behind.
As I progressed, I was amazed to see how welcoming and cheerful Fidelity individuals were and came to find that everyone – literally from any department – was willing to talk and give insights/feedback/suggestions to my project. I was able to collaborate and learn from not only the financial support team but also crossover into SWE, fullstack, and beyond – even reaching out to individuals in the international/overseas offices.
Each week, I saw myself growing both professionally and academically. I realized that an ability to communicate and build relationships is a strength to have in any position. Tackling that steep learning curve was much smoother after I proactively reached out to individuals and built a collaborative learning culture from both sides. Internally, my supervisors and colleagues took the time to explain not only the “how” behind our work but also the “why,” which made me feel like a real member of the team rather than just an intern who was here for the summer.
During my time at Fidelity, I also learned immensely about their work and giving back to the greater good (including having an intern service day at a local high school hosting workshops on financial literacy). After this summer, I would say I was able to gain a clearer sense of my interests and developed confidence interacting in a professional setting. Most importantly, this opportunity showed me how meaningful real world experience is in shaping a student’s growth.
This is part of a series of posts by recipients of the 2025 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
