Lehigh Scholar Interns at Wetherby Asset Management
This past summer, Lehigh University Posse Scholar Anna Valadao Defaria served as an intern at Wetherby Asset Management. The Wetherby internship program, established in 2021 in partnership with The Posse Foundation, provides professional development opportunities for college students interested in the financial service industry.
Anna learned of the internship program at Wetherby through the Posse Career Program.
During her internship, Anna worked on a variety of projects with teams across the firm, including investment, marketing, and finance. Her specific responsibilities included researching and writing an article on carbon offsetting, and putting together an investment memo on current opportunities within the energy sector.
“Investment and wealth management are much more than client services,” Anna says, reflecting on the major takeaways from her experiences. “Before my experience at Wetherby, I had a very simple, basic understanding of what wealth management was and looked like, but I’ve come to learn that behind the client service team is a network of teams that work on investments and financial operations and help the firm run smoothly.”
Beyond her assigned projects, Anna also had the opportunity to attend meetings with fund managers and connected with team members across the firm to learn about their careers and experiences.
“What you learn in the classroom isn’t always reflective of what you might do in real life,” Anna says, connecting the scope of her internship to academic studies at Lehigh. “My classes were good preparation for the kind of work I was doing, but I realized there are always new terms and concepts to learn that happen when you make the shift to real world projects.”
Wetherby interns receive training in various disciplines within the financial service field while building strong relationships with the organization’s team. The summer provided Anna with a unique opportunity to reflect on her broader career goals.
“I learned that it’s important to think about the person I want to be, the work I want to do, and the company I want to be a part of,” Anna says. “The unique culture I experienced at Wetherby has made me aware of the benefit of working in a company that considers their impact on the customers and the world.”
