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Senior accounting major gains job offer after BNY-Mellon summer internship

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Posted on Thursday, November 10, 2022

A Westminster College senior accounting major gained valuable corporate banking skills and a full-time job offer post-graduation through an internship with BNY-Mellon Pittsburgh over the summer.

Jarred Kohl of York, Pa., stumbled upon BNY-Mellon his sophomore year through the Westminster College Analyst Program, which highlights the benefits of interdisciplinary experiential learning projects that allow students to work with industry professionals. During the program, Kohl was introduced to former C-suite BNY-Mellon employee and Westminster alumnus Ben Nelson ’06.

Summer of his senior year, Kohl was hired as an intern in the hedge fund operations department of wealth management and was tasked with moving money through hedge funds, sending emails, arranging and attending meetings and finishing standard developmental learning courses.

Although his everyday tasks were the same, Kohl was given an opportunity to excel in his future field during the internship when he mentioned his love for Microsoft Excel to his manager. The project requirements were to create a report that would calculate the number of shares a client would have when switching mutual funds between accounts—meaning that if a client were being managed by BNY-Mellon but wanted another company to manage their money, the shares in their account would have to be converted to a different mutual fund.

After many afternoons of learning the Visual Basics coding software for Excel, Kohl’s solution was to create a button in the Excel sheet that would allow just one click and the client’s shares would be transferred to another account holder.

Kohl says the skills he honed in the Westminster classroom and through the Analyst Program were a huge help in landing him his internship.  

“Professor Petrus was able to show me how to create impressionable presentations and Ben taught me how to be curious and ask the right questions,” said Kohl. “All the different classes I have taken at Westminster have made an impact on who I am today.”

Kohl also realized the value of being immersed in the corporate community before graduation.

“My biggest takeaway from this internship was that no matter how good you are at something, if you can’t communicate or work with a team you will never be as successful as you want to be,” said Kohl.

Kohl will be joining the BNY-Mellon team located in Denver upon graduation in the spring.   

To learn more about the Westminster College accounting program, click here.