Project Management Intern, First Citizens Bank

At First Citizens, I joined the Commercial Digital team at a moment when there were far more ideas than capacity. My work focused on bringing clarity to that chaos—tracking projects, surfacing tradeoffs, and helping leaders make confident decisions about what to start, pause, or stop altogether.

I built a prioritization framework that combined technical complexity, strategic alignment, and customer impact into a single view. It wasn't glamorous, but it gave us a shared language to talk about why one intake request should move ahead of another. Seeing that framework adopted by the Enterprise Project Office was a big validation that an intern can still meaningfully influence how a large organization makes decisions.

Day to day, I lived in Jira—helping refine tickets, untangle dependencies, and make sure sprint boards reflected reality. I left the summer with a much deeper appreciation for how process, communication, and tooling all have to work together for a digital program to actually ship.