Summer Internship Spotlight: Cory Johnson at Seneca Capital Partners
- Company:
- Title: Analyst
- Location: of Denver. The office is in a shared workspace called .
- My responsibility is to analyze potential real estate acquisitions. Seneca Capital is a private equity firm that is investing in mobile home parks throughout the United States. The partners have raised nearly $20 million in their first fund, and I am helping them spend it all!
- There are no other MBA interns. It is a 2-person partnership and I am the third employee.
The internship has exceeded my expectations in all regards. Given that the firm has so few employees, I get to work closely with highly experienced and knowledgeable professionals. In the past couple months, I have learned more about real estate finance and investments that I ever could have imagined. My ultimate goal in earning an MBA is to found my own real estate investment company, and this internship has taught me many of the skills required to do just that.
I have definitely been deploying some of the skills I learned during the MBA program. In fact, I would probably be a little lost without completing the first-year curriculum. The most important classes were Corporate Finance, Applied Finance, and . The finance classes helped to establish a fundamental understanding of capital markets, debt and equity financing, and structuring pro formas.
The real estate class helped to build basic knowledge of real estate concepts. There have been some great perks as well. First, Seneca paid for an extremely valuable three-day training seminar valued at $2,000 (Mobile Home University). Second, the INDUSTRY shared office building provides kegs of free beer! The office is also dog-friendly. My boss frequently brings in his two Bernese Mountain dogs and I’ve even brought in my own puppy a couple of times.