Summer Internships - Part I

My name is Kristina Frahm and I’m on the Women’s Bowling Team at UMES. We are the 2008 NCAA National Champions and I am proud to say I was a part of that team. I am from Oswego, IL and I am a pretty outgoing person. I am officially a senior (yayy!!) and I am majoring in Accounting.

I am a part of the Student Athlete Advisory Committee (SAAC), so I can be involved more with my team as well as athletics as a whole. We talk about different problems among the teams at UMES, and how those problems can be solved. We also do community service projects to help others in need, and branch outside of sports. It’s a great way to interact with other athletes and the athletic administration.

This summer, aside from practicing as much as possible, I was given the opportunity to be an intern at Morgan Stanley Smith Barney (MSSB) in downtown Chicago. Being from a small town about an hour southwest of Chicago, I didn’t really know what to expect when I started working. My boyfriend, Elliott Alston, who plays baseball at UMES, also got the internship, so we decided to live with his mom in Chicago for the summer.

I have never really walked around downtown Chicago, so it’s quite an adventure learning my way around and not getting lost. I just finished my first official week of the internship and I am really enjoying it.

MSSB serves as financial advisors to numerous companies, governments, and investors around the world. For me, this week consisted primarily of the paperwork and getting settled in. I had to fill out and sign a lot of papers, as well as get a background check, and fingerprinted to only intern there. I got a log in and password with my own MSSB email. :-) Next week, I get an official badge that allows me to get into the building without an administrator and not as a guest.

Everyone there is really friendly and is willing to teach me anything I don’t understand. I’ve started learning about the different roles of a financial advisor and realized they work closely with clients. They are involved with the buying and selling of securities, as well as new investment strategies, and the monitoring of their investment portfolios. I haven’t been involved with any actual clients yet, but I did fill out paper that needed to be sent to them.

I am helping work on a project, which involves many of the empowered women among Chicago. Some of these women own their own businesses, make an impact on society or are involved in many different organizations. My boss wants to organize lunch-ins for networking among these women and informing them of the different investment opportunities they can be taking advantage of. I am really excited about the project and networking with these women.

That’s it for now! I will try and keep you updated when I can! Thanks for reading!

-Kristina

GO HAWKS!