Undergrad-turned-grad student works for New Jersey Department of Treasury
April 2023 – Jeremy Ferreira C’21, G’22 is reaping the rewards of the social and technical skills gained as an undergraduate and graduate alum of Drew University.
After graduating as a business major and Spanish minor, and fencing for four years, Ferreira stayed at Drew as part of the Caspersen School of Graduate Studies’ master of science in finance program, concentrating in the program’s new financial engineering offering.
To fulfill the graduate program’s internship requirement—which aims to build real-world, resume-ready experience for its students—Ferreira secured a position with the New Jersey Department of Treasury’s Revenue and Economic Analysis office.
“My experiences at Drew helped prepare me for the real world by teaching me new skills,” said Ferreira. “Those skills were both social and technical. We often had discussions in class, participated in Shark Tank events, and had various networking opportunities, all of which improved my communication skills. On the technical side, I became comfortable with various software, from Excel to Tableau to R to Bloomberg.”
Ferreira remembers immediately calling on these skills during his internship.
“I had to work with other interns on projects and then present them to our supervisor and other staff. One big project was creating a database with Excel of historic records of New Jersey tax revenue estimates from various sources and comparing them to yearly finalized numbers. Without the skills at Drew, I don’t think I would have been able to present as well as I did, nor create the database with as much detail as we did.”
After interning for five months, Ferreira landed a full-time position with the New Jersey Department of Labor as a labor market analyst, relying on his Drew experiences once again.
“The hands-on learning I got both from my internship and at Drew really helped me in my young career and helped me find that career,” he said.
“Before grad school, I had not done any internships, so during job interviews I relied heavily on the learning opportunities I had at Drew, like working with fellow students on Shark Tank presentations, hearing from experts from various sectors of the financial world, doing daily deep dives into past and current economic and financial situations using the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg, and playing with data to tell a story. Thanks to these experiences, I was able to get an internship, and through that internship, a job.”