Brianna McEwan @ Fidelity Charitable

This past week I was given the opportunity to intern at Fidelity Charitable, a small company within Fidelity Investments, which helps donors to set aside and distribute money for charitable giving. Grant Kaley was our host and he worked with us throughout the week while we did research and prepared for our presentation on the last day.

Our assignment was to go out to the NC State and UNC campuses to interview millennials to learn about their views about giving to charity. By the end of the week, we were hoping to have discovered some ways that Fidelity Charitable could appeal to the younger generation.

Victoria, Uri, Matt and I split up into groups of two for our interviews around the campuses. Although many students on both campuses attempted to avoid speaking with us, the interviews that we were able to get ended up being extremely useful and interesting. As we continued to interview more and more people, we were able to focus our questions and guide the student towards topics that would help us more with our presentation.

My favorite interview of the entire trip came from a 21-year-old Economics major. It was nice to interview him because we barely had to ask questions. He told us that he was interested in starting his own charity after school, so he seemed very well versed about charities and his views on donations. Tori and I enjoyed his interview because he really got us thinking and actually helped us to figure out better questions and come up with possible ideas and solutions that we could use in our presentation. While the interviewing process was challenging, it definitely is a great skill to have and will benefit me in the future.

After our two days of interviews, Mr. Kaley taught us how to create "Point of View Statements," which we used to identify the needs of millennials. These statements helped us to gather the large amount of information we had collected and make them more concise so that we could make use of it all.

Mr. Kaley brought a few of his colleagues to come watch our presentation on the last day of the externship. Our presentation started out by introducing ourselves and telling why we wanted to participate in this externship program. I wanted to participate because I thought that it was a great opportunity to see what working in the real world would be like. We have all taken classes and are trying to figure out what we want to do with our lives, so I think that this experience is very valuable and can help us learn more about different careers and what each would entail. We then presented our ideas and solutions to the problems. The one we chose to focus on was one that rounded up your credit card purchases to the nearest dollar or 5 dollars and the extra money goes into a charitable