Furman Metropolitan Fellowship<\/a>, an alumni-led grant program that provides mentorship and financial assistance to students who commit to interning in the New York metropolitan area for a summer.<\/p>\n\u201cIt\u2019s an incredible program,\u201d Gillaspy said. \u201cI\u2019d been to New York a couple of times as a teenager, but I didn\u2019t think of it as a plausible place to end up \u2013 a little southern girl from Conway, Arkansas, in the big city.\u201d<\/p>\n
During interviews, the Metropolitan Fellowship board members made a big impression on her. \u201cI was thinking, \u2018Even if I don\u2019t get this, I want to use all of these guys\u2019 knowledge,\u2019\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
The impression was mutual, and she landed a fellowship. The next step was applying for internships \u2013 particularly challenging because Gillaspy was spending the spring semester studying in Europe. Luckily, the board members had her back.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere was so much support from Day One,\u201d she said, including help with revising her resume, researching companies and preparing for interviews. \u201cThey knew what the people in New York were looking for. They\u2019re super plugged-in to that world.\u201d<\/p>\n
Their network reached as far as Princeton, New Jersey, putting in a good word for Gillaspy with the intern recruiter at Bloomberg\u2019s data headquarters.<\/p>\n
At Bloomberg, Gillaspy found herself suddenly immersed in an unfamiliar field. \u201cI\u2019ve never taken a finance course in my life,\u201d she said \u2013 yet for 10 weeks this summer, she and the three other interns on Bloomberg\u2019s Equities Corporate Actions Team lived and breathed financial data, taking on projects to enhance workflow and automate processes for uploading information to the company\u2019s terminals.<\/p>\n
At the end of the summer, Gillaspy had found her calling \u2013 and Bloomberg had found a new employee.<\/p>\n
\u201cA few weeks after the internship, I got a call with the return offer, which was incredible,\u201d said Gillaspy, who will begin work at Bloomberg as a global data analyst this September. Her time at Furman has given her a distinctive set of tools to apply to her work, she said.<\/p>\n
\u201cA lot of the coding and hard skills that I used in the job, I hadn\u2019t learned in any classes,\u201d she said. \u201cBut what helped me thrive is this computational mindset, saying, \u2018I have a human-based problem; how do I make a computer fix that?\u2019 That kind of thinking and problem-solving skill happens in small, discussion-based liberal arts and sciences classrooms. It\u2019s intangible, but it contributed to my success more than learning any scripts or programming.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A Metropolitan Fellowship and a summer internship helped Claire Gillaspy \u201923 land a position at Bloomberg this fall.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":265,"featured_media":21729,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[101,50],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21696","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-data-analytics","category-mathematics"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21696","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/265"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21696"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21696\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21729"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21696"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21696"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21696"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}