Andrew Page ’22 — The first week of the BIP internship was a great learning experience, and I can tell that this program will help me significantly in my understanding of business. The following three days, we went through the Financial Boot Camp with Zackery Carl ‘18. Zack showed us the ins and outs of Microsoft Excel and how it’s a useful tool in the business world. Mr. Carl helped walk us through a financial model in Excel and various other exercises to sharpen our business and critical thinking skills. For the financial model portion, Mr. Carl taught us how to create a number of things including
an income statement, a balance sheet, a cash flow statement, and working capital, depreciation, and debt schedules. Knowing how to create these parts of a financial model will be very beneficial to us when we start our food truck business in the coming weeks. I am confident that everyone participating in the BIP internship learned a lot about Excel and have benefited from the concepts that we learned from Zack.
We also worked through logic problems to strengthen our critical thinking skills. At first, we walked through the projected monthly profit of the local Applebee’s together based on only our assumptions and without the help of the internet, and then we were broken into smaller groups, where we were assigned abstract questions and told to find an answer without looking anything up. For example, my group’s problem was, “How many ping pong balls can fit into a 747?” Although my team’s answer was roughly 45,000,000 ping pong balls off, it was a very enjoyable exercise that taught us the importance of thinking critically and modeled some questions that we may be asked in an interview someday. I would like to thank the CIBE Business Innovation Program for the opportunity.
