My Scholars Practicum

Over this past summer I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to work with Acadia Family Office, located in Hunt Valley, Maryland, as an accounting intern. If you don’t know what a family office is, it’s a private wealth management advisory firm that serves ultra-high net worth individuals. To put that in perspective, all of Acadia’s clients are worth over $100 million, and several clients are worth very close to $1 billion. Acadia is slightly different from a traditional family office in that it doesn’t advise the investment side of their clients, but it does handle everything else financially, from day-to-day accounting and payroll activities to management of legal affairs to coordination of philanthropy and private foundations to tax code compliance. As an accounting intern, my role was to support the family office and tax departments, coordinating closely with my supervisor and coworkers to meet the needs of demanding clients in a timely manner. Some of the specific tasks I handled included facilitating the grant agreement process as part of private foundation expenditure responsibility, updating complex airplane expense reporting spreadsheets, conducting research on relevant tax issues, and reviewing clients’ quarterly financial statement packages for reporting errors. Throughout the internship, I gained exposure to client financial statements, mortgage documents, tax forms, and general research on client matters while developing basic auditing skills and enhancing my Excel capabilities.

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I actually found this practicum opportunity with the help of my mother, who works as a senior manager at Acadia Family Office. Acadia is still relatively small in terms of the number of clients they handle, but they have been growing rapidly over the past several years and were looking to start an internship program, so I became almost a guinea pig of sorts. After my mother told me about this opportunity, I interviewed with the owner and my supervisor, and we determined that I would be a good fit for the internship. Although my practicum search process was unique, my advice to future Media Scholars would be, first, to find a practicum experience that genuinely interests you and relates to your future aspirations and, second, to take advantage of any connections you have to find a valuable opportunity. Besides that, don’t be afraid to reach out to professionals and always be polite and respectful.

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I learned a ton from my practicum regarding both technical knowledge and soft skills. On the one hand, I gained a lot of exposure to all sorts of terms and processes in the financial world, such as mortgage documents, bank account statements, Action of Directors and Grant Agreement documents, airplane flight invoices, financial statements, tax forms (e.g. Form 2848/Power of Attorney), hedge funds, and even artwork. I also got to research relevant tax issues such as syndicated conservation easement. In addition, I got to work with new applications such as QuickBooks, Outlook, and Acadia’s billing system in Practice Management, as well as enhance my knowledge of applications I had worked with in the past, such as Excel and PowerPoint. On the other hand, just as much of my learning had to do with soft skills and working in a professional environment. I was lucky enough to have an internship that allowed me to go into the office every time, which was uncommon for other Media Scholars during the pandemic. Going into the office gave me a chance to see how a professional office environment operates and to work closely with other employees. I specifically gained valuable experience working with my supervisor, getting advice from him, and presenting the projects I worked on.

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I have grown as a professional because I have taken with me a lot of valuable experience related to my career goals that will allow me to land internships and jobs in the future. I now feel a lot more comfortable working in a professional environment with other people who possess much more knowledge and experience than me. I have also grown as a student since I was able to apply concepts and skills that I learned in school to a real world environment during my internship. I have already used my internship experience to enhance my learning during classes this past semester as well. Most of all, I have grown as a person because the soft skills I developed during my internship will help me succeed not only in my future career but also as a student, a friend, and an independent adult. Attached below is my time entry schedule at Acadia, which shows what I did each day at my internship. I chose this as my piece of evidence because it contains every task and project that I completed during my practicum, which allows you to see the variety of family office processes I was exposed to. More importantly, the time schedule shows my growth and progression as an intern over a short three months. At the start of my internship I mostly completed short and simple tasks that were based on reviewing the work of others. I also did typical “intern” work such as retrieving and sorting the mail and scanning and shredding documents. But by the end of my internship I was completing lengthier projects on more complex topics, and I was doing work that actually mattered for the company. The time schedule shows this shift and ultimately communicates my growth over the course of the practicum.

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My practicum experience will be very valuable to my career moving forward. Obviously, the internship makes a great addition to my resume and generates talking points during interviews. This practicum provides a stepping stone for other internship opportunities in the future. But beyond the resume booster benefits, many of the tasks that I performed at this internship, while at a basic level, will resurface in future internships and jobs. Having a basic fundamental understanding of a variety of topics and processes in the financial world will allow me to apply that knowledge at a higher level in the future. In addition, my practicum experience has reinforced my understanding of which career path I want to pursue after college, so it has already been applied through my educational decisions such as which majors and classes to choose. Finally, I can even see myself applying my practicum experience to my personal life in the future. Specifically, a lot of the Excel skills I learned can be applied to personal finances.

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My plans for the rest of my time at UMD are to complete the Media Scholars program, then pursue a double degree in accounting and finance, which I have already started making progress towards. Graduating with two degrees typically takes five years, but my plan is to graduate in four years using the credits I brought with me from high school into college. After I graduate, I plan to take the CPA exam and earn my public accountant certification, then work at a Big 4 accounting firm for a few years before transitioning into private accounting or a different focus. Currently, I am not entirely sure where I want to end up in 15-20 years, but it will depend on whether I like accounting or finance more than the other. If I end up loving finance, I might end up going into stocks or becoming a financial manager, but right now it’s too early to tell.

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Finally, I want to reflect on my practicum’s relation to media. My internship actually wasn’t very connected to media—it didn’t play a significant part in my day-to-day work. Because Acadia’s clients are ultra-wealthy, they prefer to keep a low profile rather than advertise themselves all over the media. Media didn’t play a significant role in Acadia’s day-to-day operations either, as they handled purely financial processes. However, media did become important when it came to Acadia’s promotion and recruiting efforts. The family office has a website as well as LinkedIn and Facebook pages that are updated regularly with developments relevant to the company and the financial world. For example, Acadia’s LinkedIn might upload a post about several of its employees visiting a Towson University career fair or post a link to an article about a current tax issue. Media was especially important for Acadia around the time I interned there because they were trying to jumpstart an internship program, and reaching college students required the company to be effective in its social media efforts. What I took away from my practicum’s relation to media is this: Media is everywhere. Even if it doesn’t play a significant role, media is still relevant to every company’s goals.