This summer, Oak Partners welcomed four interns to its offices to learn more about the financial industry from experienced partners and wealth advisors. With so many interns starting at the same time, Oak Partners decided to refine its existing summer internship process. While Oak Partners has worked with interns before, this new internship program allows interns to better learn about the industry, develop financial and relational skills, and help understand and explore what they want to pursue in a future career.
This eight-week internship program is broken down into four different topics, spending two weeks focusing on each topic. The four parts are organized as follows:
Account and investment management
Relationship management and business development
Financial planning and proposal development
Event planning and marketing
With personal connections to Oak Partners through family and friends, all four interns were eager to begin their summer internships in May and June. Each intern works with an assortment of advisors to learn about different aspects of the job.
On an average day, they sit in on team and client meetings, create client review summaries, and learn about various financial components such as portfolio management, stocks, bonds, mutual funds, and more. Their duties also include attending investment company representative meetings where they get to meet with product partners and hear their future outlooks.
“I am currently working on retirement analysis for clients and RMD reports,” said Trey Schub, a junior Economics major at Wabash College.
Through their experience with the internship so far, the interns were most surprised to learn about the importance of growing relationships with clients. In order for clients to choose an advisor who assists with their financial planning, they need to build trust and rapport with those advisors.
“You learn about the financial part, but you learn more about people. You learn how to interact with people and create relationships with your clients. I’ve helped set up meetings with clients and sat in on a lot of meetings with them. Sitting in on the meetings is one of the coolest parts because you get to see how you interact with the clients and build those relationships,” said Deakon Lee, a senior Financial Counseling and Planning major at Purdue University.
The comprehensive nature of the four-part summer internship program has given each intern a better understanding of how to succeed in the financial industry through growing both their financial knowledge and their interpersonal skills.
“I learn something new every day at Oak Partners, but I'd have to say my biggest takeaways are my refined ability to analyze stocks far beyond what I came in expecting and the focus on maintaining a good client relationship,” said Braedon Rossetti, a junior Finance major at Indiana University Indianapolis. “I'm the kind of person who learns best from actual activity, and I can confidently say I've learned things that I wouldn't learn from school at Oak Partners.”
As a bonus, the interns were also able to compete against their Oak Partners coworkers in a pickleball tournament and put their financial abilities to the test in a stock competition against their fellow interns. Niko Paic, a junior Finance major at Valparaiso University, is currently winning the stock competition.
“They presented us with a hypothetical portfolio competition during our time here. It's a stock competition between all of us, and we have a total of up to 10 stocks,” Paic said. “At the end, whoever has the most amount of money in their portfolio is the winner. It’s a pretty cool opportunity for us to learn about the stock market by ourselves.”
For more information about Oak Partners, visit oakpartners.com.
