After spending the summer before her junior year conducting research, BHP senior, Rachel Gosch, was ready for a challenging internship this past summer. The mathematics major was interested in finding something technical that also involved consulting. At a loss for where to start, she Googled “Statistical Internships,” and discovered Summit Consulting.
Summit Consulting in Washington, D.C., was calling for an intern in their Federal Credit Modeling and Forecasting branch, which was right up Rachel’s alley. Rachel applied and completed two phone interviews before landing the position as a Summer Analyst with Summit. Once she accepted the internship, she spoke with her eventual mentor at Summit to determine which groups and projects would be a good fit for her.
Being in D.C., Summit works a lot with government entities such as the Department of Transportation. Within her branch, Rachel was placed on a team consulting the Small Business Administration (SBA).
Rachel and her team were tasked with two main contracts with the SBA. First was working on Independent Verification and Validation (IV&V) of their different cash flow models. Her team acted as a third party consult to help the SBA forecast their budget and project how much to allocate to their different lending. The second task was to perform portfolio analysis on those lending programs to assess which lenders may be high-risk. Rachel’s team then had to present their findings to the client, “The presentation skills I learned in BA 324 really helped me make the findings understandable and presentable,” said Rachel.
Working in the nation’s capital, Rachel had the chance to learn a lot about federal budget planning and allocations for groups such as the SBA, “I wasn’t expecting to learn so much about the SBA! I now know all about the different federal lending programs available for small business owners, how the process of receiving such a loan works, and the different criteria used to grade SBA-approved lenders,” said Rachel.
The six summer interns at Summit, including Rachel
Rachel spent 10 weeks in D.C. interning at Summit and one of her favorite parts of working at the consulting firm was the young atmosphere. “Summit is a young company, so most of the people that work there are around my age, which made fitting into the culture easier,” said Rachel. There were six interns total at Summit this summer and they became close doing things together outside of work. Of the six interns, Rachel was one of two undergraduates, the other was a student from University of North Carolina. The remaining four were graduate students at George Washington University (MBA), American University (MS), University of Tennessee (MS) and Rutgers University (MS).
In her senior year, Rachel is currently deciding between continuing her education or entering the workforce. She is actively applying to different master’s programs in Financial Engineering and Financial Mathematics. She is particularly interested in a Management Science and Engineering program at Columbia and will also likely apply to UT’s Business Analytics program. She is keeping her options open and also recruiting for positions dealing with statistics, data analytics and/or financial modeling.
Looking back on her time at UT, her fondest memory is all of the football games and seeing the tower lit orange, particularly when the team beat OU in 2013 and A&M in 2011.