Artem Misiurenko

My name is Artem. I'm from Russia. I'm a junior at NYU Abu Dhabi and I'm studying Economics and Finance. This summer, I'm interning at Emaar, the largest real estate developer in the UAE. With 78 percent market share of the real estate market in the country. 

My role at this internship is finance and investment analyst. I'm doing a range of things. So it starts from feasibility and investment analysis to sometimes auditing, to accounting, and checking different reconciliations against what we have and what other companies give us in other countries. I’m doing a large range of things so I wouldn't say I'm doing only one thing. On LinkedIn, I had investment analyst first, but then I realized that investment was not the biggest part of what I was doing. Sometimes I have to do it, other times you just have to look at financial statements and compare what their mistakes and things like that. Sometimes doing valuation, sometimes doing auditing, so it's very different things.

A bit about what my day-to-day looks like: I wake up, have breakfast, shower, brush my teeth. I live right on the other side of here so I go through Dubai Mall to get here, it’s a nice 20-minute walk. I come here at around 8:30am and the first thing I would get to is my emails. Right now, I am one of the key testers of a new accounting application for the company, I'm the only one giving feedback and pushing the project forward.

This is what I'm doing at the moment and what I'm doing most of the time. I open it, I look at the financial statements, how the statement of cash flow looks, how other people would perceive it, because after me it will go to people in different countries where Emaar is present, and they are going to be working with it. And what I'm delivering right now is going to be what they are going to be using later, and it's extremely important to give good feedback to the people right now developing the application so that others can also understand it. This is just an example of one of the tasks that was assigned to me. There isn’t a single day which is similar to another. There is a bit of a routine to this role as with any other role, of course but for the most part every day seems to be different. 

I think it's really nice to get exposure to all parts of the business, especially here at Emaar International. It's not only about finance. It's also about administrative work, because everybody reports to us, and we have to guarantee that they are delivering.

I think what has been extremely helpful for me is learning the trends in different countries, while learning the things that are very specific to real estate. Like how they find the sales prices, how they invest in projects, and how they look at it because it's not exactly the same as investing in equities. This is, I think, what I would like to do in the future — to focus on the outside countries, not just the UAE, specifically developing countries and how returns are there compared to developed countries.

All the finance courses I've taken helped me so much and they changed me a lot as a person. I was interested in economics before coming to the university, but now I am more interested in finance because of all the things these courses showed me. I like to be more specific, going into a more application-based field. This is exactly what I enjoy and this is what NYUAD has shown me. It showed me what I enjoy and it gave me an opportunity to develop in this particular way, this path that I'm taking, I think, is extremely important for me and for developing as a person and as a professional as well. I’ve taken so many courses in Abu Dhabi, in London, and in New York, which changed my perception of what I want to do so much that now I feel like I'm closer to understanding what I want to do more than ever.

I started doing an internship when I was a freshman and I did this because I talked to students, and they told me that this internship is going to help you understand what you really want to do. And if you don't like what you are doing, you just move on you, you just change your place, you try to understand more, you know, and there is nothing bad in that. If you really don't like the place, you shouldn't stay there and it's fine. This is what I want other students to know. If you go for something and if you don't enjoy it, that’s okay. There is always going to be some risk but at the end of the day, it's your life and you have to do what makes you happy. You either bring happiness to your work place or you find the workplace which makes you happy. It's either or. Otherwise, it doesn't make any sense because if you want to work some place for many years, you better be happy. Otherwise, what's the point of this life?