By Summer Intern Krishika Jain
This summer, I got the opportunity to intern at the Pension Boards-United Church of Christ (PBUCC) as an Information Technology (IT) intern. The one thing that drew me to this internship is how the organization operates at the intersection of faith and finance. I enjoyed working here and gained valuable experience that will be useful in my personal and professional life. I would like to thank the Pension Boards for this incredible experience.
Interning at PBUCC was different than other IT companies. At PBUCC, I developed team building, communication, management skills, and programming skills. All this was possible because of the efforts taken by the team here at PBUCC. I was also happy to apply the knowledge I gained in school about Python programming to the projects I was assigned. I would like to thank Bill Gentry, Omni Scripter for IT, who helped in enhancing my Python skills and in giving me challenges that pushed me to learn more and more every day. The IT team is great to work with as they always appreciated my efforts, which encouraged me to challenge myself and go beyond my own thinking while developing new skills.
The highlight of this summer internship was the Capstone Project. I liked the idea that the interns worked on this Capstone Project together applying our skills from different sectors. At the end of the internship, we present our project to the executives, board members, and the whole staff of PBUCC. I have never worked with a financial services company, so at first I was nervous as to what my role would be in this project. At the same time, I was excited to learn more about finance and how IT and finance would come together. As I started working with other interns, I learned about the various components of finance. I learned to analyze data and visualize it using Power BI. Further, I developed a calculator for Target Annuitization Date (TAD) Funds using Python and an application/reporting tool for the TAD funds.
Overall, it has been a great experience working here at PBUCC!