Guest Post: Prophet makes financial modeling fun

Alexandra Vlasenkova spent the summer as a finance intern at Prophet and she is a rising junior at The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

Startups are fun, tight-knit and bring so much learning experience. The work that you do is very impactful and valued by your colleagues. You also get to make great friends and truly get to know people you are working with. You get the autonomy to work on your own projects and great responsibility for that work. It’s a great way to start your career – fun, challenging and very rewarding way of becoming independent and developing strong work ethic.

This summer I had the opportunity to intern at Prophet, a fintech startup that develops a software to build financial models faster and easier. For someone like me, planning to work in finance, it was perfect. I needed to learn how to build financial models, and Prophet’s software is designed to make building those models very intuitive, which made it a great tool to start learning with!

I worked with companies in different industries and helped build models for them, which not only made me more familiar with financial jargon and terminology, it also gave me a deeper understanding of what they meant and how they each impacted a company’s financial statements. It also provided a friendly medium to practice building models, which is the best way to develop that skill.

This experience gave me financial modeling and valuation skills, taught me how to think like an investor, but also like a founder, brought me confidence in my financial knowledge and helped me determine my future career path. It brought amazing friends and terrific mentors and opened an exciting world of entrepreneurship.

This was truly unique and transformative experience – thank you!