April 19, 21, and 23

This week was also spent doing a spread sheet for Terry and Rebecca. This week though, I spent analyzing last year's sales data. I recorded the unrealized gains and losses of the clients' investments in mutual funds, stocks, bonds, ETFs and cash & money funds. I had to fill in the unit cost of how much Terry bought each investment for and I analyzed what the return was for the client. On a lighter note, I helped Rebecca pick out the birthday card that we will start sending to each client when it comes time for their birthdays. This is a form of marketing because it is keeping up with customer relations.

April 12, 14, 16

This week was spent mainly compiling data for Terry's clients' portfolio reports. It was a very rigorous task that forced me to learn more about stocks and investment strategies. It required going through the clients' files, looking for the exact numbers that I needed, and making an excel spread sheet of the data. This task was important because not only did it cut Terry's work in half, it also gave me a lot of responsibility because the numbers I found will affect the clients' yield of return. The task gave me responsibility and a sense of trust. I was busy working on the client portfolio reports all day Monday and Wednesday so that they would be ready for Terry to start using the beginning of the next week. On Friday I helped Rebecca file paperwork and catch up on the usual daily intern tasks.

April 5, 7, 9

This week I worked on printing, packaging and mailing the newsletters to the clients. Monday primarily consisted of folding all the newsletters. I didn't count them but there was so many! Wednesday I worked on addressing all of the letters and putting stamps on them. Friday I worked on mailing the buy and sell records to the clients so they can have them for their records. I had to make sure the names matched up, package them, address them and send them out. Basically, my hands were very tired after this week.

March 29, 31

This week I helped Rebecca and Terry work on the company's March newsletter that we planned to send out at the beginning of next week. I helped her decide what content should be in the newsletter and I copy edited everything that went into it. Terry and Rebecca respected my opinions and valued my comments. It made me feel important and like an actual asset to the business. The newsletter teaches me a lot about marketing because it allows the company to communicate with all of its clients. Terry writes an article, which I edit, about an issue in the financial world that will help clients better understand it. There's always a financial definition and there's also fun facts and statistics pertaining to finance and investment.

March 22, 24, 26

Last week I did not go to my internship because it was spring break. I came back refreshed and ready to produce new marketing ideas, but since I was gone for spring break there was a lot of little things that weren't done around the office. Therefore, my week basically consisted of catching up with my boss and co-worker and organizing a plethora of important papers into clients' files. I think that my boss and co-worker appreciated me a little more when I came back because they didn't have me there to help out with the little things I do for the company every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

March 8, 10, 12

This week was a little more relaxed because we got a majority of the tasks done that have been hanging over our heads. I worked on organizing a binder of all of the clients' buy and sell histories most of the day on Monday and Wednesday. Friday was a fun day because it was my boss' birthday so we threw him a surprise party at the office. Needless to say, we didnt get that much done Friday but it was really fun.

March 1, 3, 5

This week at ICC, I helped Rebecca to finish up the monthly newsletter. We just started doing the newsletter, which we believe will add to the company because it shows the clients that there's a human element to the work that Terry and Rebecca do for them besides managing their money. I was responsible for writing the definition section of the letter. In each issue we're going to define a financial word that will help people understand the financial world in a clearer light. This month I defined what an Exchange-Traded Fund is, which in short is similar to a mutual fund. This is the link to February's newsletter:

http://www.icsadvisors.com/2010_February.pdf

February 22, 24, 26

This week at ICC I worked with Rebecca to get the website up and running. The address is icsadvisors.com. There is a Home, Contact, About, Services, OU Faculty, and Newsletter page. The site serves current clients by giving them an electronic form of our monthly newsletter. It's main purpose, however, is to gain prospective clients, especially OU faculty seeing as how we have an entire page dedicated to that demographic. I am proud to say that I designed the OU faculty page. It took forever to figure out what we all wanted it to say and how we wanted it to be, but it looks really professional and gets our ideas across to not only the faculty, but anyone who reads the page.

February 15, 17, 19

This week was primarily made up of working on the company's new website, and of course, filing. On the 15th I worked hard to organize the layout of one of the pages on the new website, which we hope to launch soon. On the 17th I made sure that all the information was on the website that we wanted to be on there, and did some last changes. I have been working in Intuit SiteBuilder, and I've learned a lot about designing websites. We had issues when it came to the layout of the website working on all web browsers. Google Chrome was not reading the graphics correctly, so I spent a half an hour on the phone trying to figure out how to fix the problem. The 19th was primarily composed of alphabetizing and filing a huge stack of clients' paperwork.

February 8, 10, 12

In the wake of all the changes happening at my internship, Terry changed the company name from Financial Counseling Services to Investment Counseling Corporation. This week I primarily focused on helping Rebecca to clean out the filing cabinets. The files are loaded with extremely old and out-dated information. So, I went through the files, added new paperwork and shredded old, unuseful paperwork.

February 1, 3, 5

This week at ICC, Rebecca and I focused on finalizing all of the forms we had been working on last week. We made sure all the information was correct and that it was ready to be mailed. I spent part of Wednesday and most of Friday highlighting what needed to be signed by the clients, filling out the envelopes, making copies of all the forms, stuffing the envelopes with all the paperwork and finally mailing the forms to the clients.

January 25, 27, 29

This was my first week back to Investment Counseling Corporation after my long Christmas break, which my boss was so nice to give me off. The company is in the process of changing broker-dealers, so this week I primarily had to work with Terry's (my boss) assistant, Rebecca, to fill out a bunch of paperwork. It involved finding the clients' file and looking for the information that was needed to complete the plethora of forms we had to mail to both the clients for signatures and also the new broker-dealer. It was stressful, but I learned a lot of financial jargon in the process.