And so it begins...

...My life in the working world.

Week two of my internship. For those who need a refresher course, I'm interning with Dow Jones in the Risk and Compliance department. My official job description read something along the lines of "This internship will focus on enhancing the information available for State Owned Companies blady blady blah. The intern should be able to research State Owned Companies yaddah yaddah yaddah."
Read: This internship relies heavily on Copy Paste skills, and the intern need only be slightly smarter than a baboon to succeed.

Clearly, there is a whole lot of grunt work that needs to be done for the Risk and Compliance team, and it turns out that I'm just the sort of free labor girl to do it! To be fair, while my task, which consists of searching for identifying codes for a list of companies and copy/pasting these codes into a massive excel spreadsheet, is quite boring, it has two major advantages. First of all, it does not require much brain power at all, so I am able to zone out and think about important stuff like where and how I should go about applying for jobs, ways I can enhance my CV to convince someone I'm worth hiring, and what I'm going to do with the rest of my life (read: what I want to make for dinner, whether or not I have showered recently and what I would do with a million dollars or a pony). Secondly, I like to use the other 45% of my brain that isn't consumed by Copy/Paste activities and day dreaming to actually think about what the point is to this mundane task my supervisors have given me. Surprisingly, its kind of interesting when you get down to it.

See, corruption and fraudulent activities like money laundering, bribery, black market activity etc are kind of a big deal, and not just because they are immoral. These activities take wealth and growth opportunities away from the legitimate sectors of a country's economy. Obviously that's bad for lots of reasons. In short, it screws up the way societies and markets work in a big way.

Where does my job factor into this? Well, in order to try and curb fraudulent activity, which is very difficult to do because of its underhand nature, there are all these laws put in place that banks have to follow when dealing with specific companies and individuals. Where do banks get the information about who these companies and individuals are? From companies like Dow Jones of course who compile large databases that list all of these risky individuals and companies. And those codes that I have to look up all day? Well, each code corresponds to a company and allows Dow Jones clients to find information on said companies more efficiently, so they can be better prepared to fight corruption. So basically, my copy/past skills are helping to save the world. Pretty cool, aye?

So that's my internship in a very very small nutshell. Better hit the hay as I've got to wake up with the roosters along with the rest of the working world tomorrow.