Touring Amsterdam

Author: James Pitzer | Major: Finance | Semester: Summer 2025

My name is James Pitzer. I’m a junior finance major at the University of Arkansas, Sam M. Walton College of Business. During the summer of 2025, I lived in Ireland, interning for BVP (Business Venture Partners) Investments. BVP Investments is a relatively small venture capital fund that makes seed and growth investments in emerging health sciences and climate technology companies.

During my time at BVP Investments, I worked on several important projects for the team. My most notable project was the preparation of a deal sourcing document to be used for the launch of a new debt fund. To help launch the fund, which would allocate €2.5 mullion across several companies, I did research on over 300 Irish manufacturing companies, eventually narrowing the list down to around 50 potential suitors for investment. I also worked on other relevant projects, including taking regular notes on the portfolio companies current affairs to support regular portfolio update meetings. Portfolio update meetings were a very regular occurrence at BVP and incredibly important to its operations as important decisions were regularly made regarding fund strategy during these meetings.

During my internship I was able to continue improving my skills in areas including communication, collaboration, and teamwork. These will all be very important for me going forward in my college career and into my professional career after. As the finance industry tends to be teamwork based, it’s important for me to learn and continue to develop those skills. As far as what’s next for me, I will be joining the University of Arkansas Student Investment Fund as a fixed income analyst and will be looking for another finance related internship for the summer of 2026. I would like to stay on the investment side of things in the finance industry if possible and have become particularly interested in asset management. I’m also interested in going into investment banking, as it offers such a steep learning curve for those who have just graduated from college, which makes it stand out from all other roles.

I learned several important things about the finance industry, including how relationship-based it is. Whether it be the relationships you have with your coworkers to make your long days more fun, or relationships with clients that keep the business running, relationships are extremely important. In BVP’s case, most of its business came from repeat customers, and it was evident how important this was to them. I was able to see and hear meetings between BVP’s CEO and CFO and their clients and was impressed with the amount of effort they were putting into relationships. Another example of this was their approach to brokers finding investors for the firm. Typically, BVP would take 3% of an investment up front, but when a broker helped find investors, BVP would let the broker keep the 3% fee in order to strengthen their relationship and lead to more investment in the future.

All in all, the experience was very helpful for me in order to learn more about the finance industry and gain relevant international exposure to different industries and a different work culture. I think going forward, this experience will be very helpful for me to stand out from other candidates for other jobs and internships that I seek in the future. I’m very thankful to have had the chance to make this summer happen and would absolutely recommend doing something like this to anyone who is looking to get something extra out of the college experience.