Each summer, students from the University of Delaware’s Alfred Lerner College of Business and Economics gain important real-world professional skills through internships. In each installment of this series, you’ll hear firsthand about how one Lerner student secured their internship, what their experience as an intern was like and what comes next!
Jordan Battee, Class of 2020, majoring in financial planning and wealth management with a minor in trust management, spent his summer in Greenville, Delaware as a wealth management summer analyst at Bank of America Private Bank.
Q: How did you find out about this internship?
Battee: I found out about this internship through the trust management minor at UD. We [trust management minor students] are required to take an internship with a trust company during our junior year in order to get real life trust experience.
I chose this internship because Bank of America was a large and established bank that provided the best office, benefits and opportunity to get the most hands-on experience during my time there. I would be able to do much more than if I interned at any other trust company and they are the best in the business!
Q: What is the most exciting task that you have undertaken in your role?
Battee: The most exciting project I have undertaken during my time this summer was when I was able to make a presentation to the office of 25 or so employees with another intern from the trust program at UD. Through the bank’s internship program, we were required to do a presentation on the topic of our choosing and had chosen to present on the life cycle of a trust.
We incorporated our experience and the things we did during our time at the internship [into our presentation] and were able to use those experiences as examples for the topic we were talking about. The senior trust officers gave us great reviews and the managing director for our office liked it so much that he sent it to his boss, the chief fiduciary officer of the company. He wanted to use it as training material and then sent it to the president of the private bank. This was really exciting for us to hear about for a project we had worked on for 10 weeks!
Q: What did you learn through this internship that you don’t think you would have learned anywhere else?
Battee: The biggest thing I learned from this internship was about how unique our office in Delaware was. We were able to work on unique kinds of trusts and our office operated in a way that no other office in our company did because of how important and unique the laws regarding trust administration are. We visited a few other offices that worked with trusts and we could tell when we talked to them that we operated completely different from the way they did and had a lot of knowledge and skills that many trust admins and officers in the company didn’t possess.
Q: What is an example of a time you were able to apply something you learned at the Lerner College to your role?
Battee: Believe it or not, the first time I was able to apply something I learned from Lerner was on the first day! The first day of my internship I had to go over a whole 70 page trust agreement and pull out certain provisions throughout the document like dispositive, crummy powers and age attainments. I had practiced this in my estate planning and other trust management classes. I was surprised with how quickly that knowledge had translated to my first day on the job.
As the internship progressed, I was able to hold full-blown conversations with senior trust officers and was able to make contributions on tasks that normally require you to have a few years of experience before you have the knowledge required to perform them. The minor did a great job of preparing me for what a job working in trust would be like.
Q: What has been the most fun part of your internship?
Battee: The most fun part of my internship was getting to meet all of the different kinds of employees who had worked at the bank. My office was full of great people who had tons of experience and let me shadow and ask tons of questions about anything that was on my mind. Besides that, I was able to visit a few of the nearby locations in New Jersey and Pennsylvania to meet portfolio managers, wealth strategists and private client advisors, to name a few. Everyone was incredibly nice and there were always a ton of food and snacks, which was a nice perk!
Q: How do you think this internship will help you with your professional goals?
Battee: I think this internship will help me with my professional goals due to the amount of people I was able to network and connect with. I met so many different people and was able to make many connections who were readily available and willing to offer advice and guidance whenever I needed it. They shared their experiences and insights into each of their specific careers and career paths that they had taken which helped me narrow down specifically what career I want to move towards post-graduation. Even after completing the internship I have lunches scheduled with a few of the people from our Philadelphia and Trenton offices who I still have to meet and who want to be mentors to me as I begin my career.
Q: What are your plans or next steps once this internship is over?
Battee: My plans after this internship are to continue to network and focus on studying for the CFP exam during my senior year.