A finance internship can give students a closer look at how companies make decisions about spending, forecasts, performance, and future priorities. It can also help students understand which areas of finance align with their skills and interests.

Youssouf Diagana, a Kogod senior majoring in business administration with a specialization in finance and a minor in computer science, spent eight weeks working with Medallia’s Financial Planning and Analysis (FP&A) team.

Diagana worked alongside financial analysts examining forecasts, spending, financial performance, and quarterly targets. His largest project brought together his interests in finance and technology: an AI-powered tool designed to help analysts work with financial data and generate insights more efficiently.

The internship gave Diagana an opportunity to apply skills he had developed at Kogod while exploring an area of finance that could shape what he does after graduation.

How Do You Find and Prepare for a Finance Internship?

Diagana found Medallia’s internship posting online and turned to Kogod resources as he prepared to apply.

Kogod’s Career Development Center helped him prepare through mock interviews, while conversations with professors gave him a chance to revisit concepts that could come up during the application process.

Diagana’s preparation combined career support with his own academic review, helping him approach the interview process with a stronger understanding of both the role and the financial knowledge it required.

What Do You Learn During a Finance Internship?

Working alongside Medallia’s analysts gave Diagana a closer look at how finance teams use data to support decisions across a company.

Diagana saw how FP&A connects different areas of finance, giving him exposure to the processes companies use to evaluate performance, plan for future spending, and set financial targets. The breadth of the work was especially useful for someone still deciding which area of finance he wanted to pursue.

“It was an internship that wasn’t just busywork,” Diagana said. “I gained a lot of hands-on experience, and I feel much more knowledgeable coming out of Medallia.”

How Is AI Used in a Finance Internship?

Diagana’s largest project at Medallia brought together his interests in finance, analytics, and artificial intelligence.

During the eight-week internship, Diagana worked on an AI-powered forecasting and planning tool that allowed financial analysts to import spending data from other software and generate insights and predictions more quickly.

According to Diagana, the tool reduced a process that previously took more than a day to under five minutes.

Diagana saw how AI could help financial analysts spend less time processing information and more time using it to inform their work. The project gave him a practical example of how technology is changing financial analysis and planning.

How Does Business School Prepare You for a Finance Internship?

Diagana drew on several areas of his Kogod coursework during his internship at Medallia.

Courses in accounting, statistics, and business finance gave him a foundation for understanding financial data and the questions analysts were trying to answer. His experience with AI at Kogod also helped him approach technology as a tool that could be applied to financial work.

“I believe that I was very much ahead of the curve on how AI can be used in finance,” Diagana said.

Diagana’s academic background gave him experience working across finance, data, and technology before he encountered that same combination at Medallia. His internship gave him a setting to apply those skills to the work of an FP&A team.

How Does an Internship Change the Way Students Approach Coursework?

When Diagana returned to Kogod after his summer at Medallia, he enrolled in intermediate corporate finance. He recognized concepts from his internship in the equations, Excel work, and financial topics he encountered in the course.

Diagana now had professional context for how companies could use the concepts he was studying. His classmates also returned with experiences from internships of their own, bringing different perspectives into class discussions.

“There’s so many broad experiences and so many people that are bringing in a lot of new points of view from other internships,” Diagana said.

The exchange shows how professional experience can continue to shape a student’s education after an internship ends. Students can bring questions, examples, and perspectives from their workplaces back into their coursework.

How Does an Internship Help You Choose a Career?

Working in FP&A exposed Diagana to different types of financial work while building on his interest in analytics.

“I came into Medallia knowing I wanted to do finance, but not knowing really which field of finance,” Diagana said.

By the end of the internship, Diagana was considering careers in business analytics or financial analytics. He described the experience as “transformative” and said it gave him “a perfect groundwork” for what comes next.

Diagana returned to Kogod with more than eight weeks of professional experience. He had a clearer sense of the work that interested him and new context for the finance concepts he would continue studying before graduation.