Job Description Final

Corporate Finance Intern (In Hollywood)

This past summer, I worked at Universal studios with their film division as a finance intern on their global licensing team. The global licensing team was in charge of keeping track of all the movie revenue from licensing. Licensing is when movie studios allow companies to make products using their intellectual property for example Jurassic park toys, or Fast and Furious t-shirts. This internship was a fun experience where I learned about the movie industry and gained a lot of practical finance skills. Yet, I would not recommend this internship to people who don’t like due dates, large projects, or figuring out things on their own.

Throughout my three-month experience, my job was to be a copy machine, a Labrador Retriever, and excel wizard all at the same time. To make it harder I was dealing with super large files on a five-year-old laptop that would crash all the time. Throughout this internship I felt like I was a circus performer juggling ten plates at the same time while balancing on a unicycle.

Copy Machine

One of my most basic tasks was to recreate annual slide decks with adjustments to accommodate changes from the previous year. This task consisted of:

· Creating slides following previous years format with current years information.

· Recreating charts to reflect the new data and adding new charts for new movies or regional changes.

· Creating the accompanying tables in excel with all the formulas programed in to pull the latest data from the database.

This was one of the first and frequent tasks I had to do. For example, during a Monday team meeting my boss would assign me a slide deck with 40 slides and give me till Friday morning to have the new slide deck with updated charts and accompanying tables.

Labrador Retriever

This task was more of a side task that I would do throughout the day and week. The task was looking for figures and statistics for my colleagues. My colleagues gave me this task to teach me how to use the various data systems that they used to store contracts, deal details, and sales information. I felt like a Labrador retriever fetching data and contract details for my colleagues on my team. Some examples of data or contract details fetch would be:

· % of revenue that came from LATM for 2020

· What are we forecasting for Jurassic World Lego sales in the US?

· What is Mattel paying us to use the Minions intellectual property?

I enjoyed this task because it allowed me to understand the business better and learn about the internal systems and vocab. This knowledge helped me when I was building slide decks and excel spreadsheets.

Excel Wizard

The most complicated part of my internship was building new excel spreadsheets. This was both the hardest and most rewarding type of task I did this summer. If you aren’t a self-starter or hate vague tasks you would hate this part of my internship. For example, my boss Monica would give me an excel spreadsheets of data she would want me to work with. Then ask me to create a new spreadsheet that would anaylze the data in a new way. Some of the spreadsheets I created for my boss were:

· A spreadsheet that analyzed regional performance for the past year that accounted for size of the region and growth.

· A spreadsheet that projected what companies would fall short of their sales target this year and what companies fell short of projected sales in the previous year.

· A table that could show individual contracts differences in forecasted vs actual profits.

This internship was my first real experience working in a true corporate environment. The first time I’ve had to commute every morning and night to and from work. The internship had its ups and down, but I grew a lot from the experience and would do it again despite all the stress and difficult moments. Besides now at least I can tell people I’ve worked in the movie business. Passive Sentences: 6.6%  Flesch Reading Ease: 60.3 Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level: 10