Name: Nastia Biryuchinskaya

Class Year: 2016

Internship Placement: I will be working at an organization Entrepreneur Works in the Lending department. I will be helping out the Lending department fulfill the company’s mission to “provide supportive services to entrepreneurs and small business owners to assist them in starting or incorporating an existing business better.”

What’s happening? We’d love to hear how your internship is going!

This summer I helped Entrepreneur Works fulfill its mission to help underserved entrepreneurs successfully finance businesses in the Great Philadelphia area. The responsibilities that I had at my internship included guiding clients through company’s policies and lending services, assisting them at filling out loan applications, and helping my supervisor with loan underwriting process.

At Entrepreneur Works, the decision of the loan committee to give out a loan is based on people’s personal characteristics, their ideas, and hard work instead of the amount of money they already have or their ability to repay (even though, of course, this criteria is taken into account). Taking those things into consideration really makes a difference and shows that the Entrepreneur Works team really cares about the people and works hard to improve people’s lives in the Greater Philadelphia region.

I would often witness how the organization was working hard to fundraise to be able to lend out to more people on better terms. What I really liked at this internship was to see people who are so passionate about an idea for a business, their creativity and desire to help their community, as well as the excitement of the Entrepreneur Works team to do their best to help those clients achieve their goals. This summer internship at Entrepreneur Works was an extension of what I learned over the course of the three years at Bryn Mawr and an opportunity to explore more the field of microfinance.