When senior and finance major Dekena Wade talks about the future of finance, she doesn’t see artificial intelligence as a replacement for human expertise. She sees it as a tool that can help professionals work smarter, make better decisions, and solve complex problems more efficiently.
That perspective recently helped Wade earn a competitive academic-year internship with MetLife, where she will serve as an Internal Audit–AI & Workflow Design intern through May 2027 while completing her final year at Brooklyn College.
In the role, Wade will work with MetLife’s Global Professional Practices & Operations team, helping explore how AI and user-centered workflow design can improve areas such as audit planning, reporting, knowledge management, and operational effectiveness. Her responsibilities will include identifying workflow challenges, mapping business processes, supporting AI-enabled solutions, testing use cases, and gathering feedback from stakeholders.
The opportunity came through the mentorship and professional network of Ngoc Cindy Pham, associate professor of marketing, management, and entrepreneurship. Pham encouraged Wade to pursue the internship because it aligned closely with her interests in finance, technology, and process improvement.
Wade’s interest in applied AI began in fall 2025 while enrolled in an AI and Financial Modeling course. Rather than letting her class projects end with the semester, she continued developing them independently, teaching herself how to transform financial models and AI concepts into functional web-based tools.
As AI technology rapidly evolved, Wade regularly updated her projects and experimented with new ways to apply emerging capabilities to real-world financial and business challenges. Over time, she transformed the projects into interactive websites and brought them together in a portfolio she designed and built herself. The site also became a platform for publishing essays examining financial and geopolitical developments and their potential impact on businesses, markets, and communities.
“My interest in applied AI began in a Brooklyn College classroom, but I didn’t want the projects to end when the semester did,” Wade said. “I continued developing them into web-based tools, brought them together in a portfolio, and began publishing my own analysis of financial and geopolitical events. That process taught me that building technology and explaining why it matters are equally important. What excites me about MetLife is the opportunity to bring together finance, technology, user-centered design, and responsible AI to improve how people work and make decisions.”
Wade’s work at the intersection of finance and artificial intelligence extends beyond the classroom. During the MetLife interview process, she highlighted an AI application she helped develop during a commercial real estate hackathon focused on investment analysis. Designed for investment teams, the multi-agent application assigns six AI agents distinct responsibilities in reviewing offering memoranda and connects their work through a coordinated workflow.
The agents organize property, lease, financial, and risk information, allowing investment professionals to move more efficiently from fragmented documents to actionable insights. Wade helped develop the application’s initial large-language-model library and personally trained and deployed one of the agents, contributing both technical expertise and an understanding of user needs.
That project demonstrated both technical skill and a practical understanding of how emerging technologies can solve real business challenges, qualities that helped distinguish Wade among a highly competitive applicant pool.
For Wade, the internship represents more than a professional achievement. It is an opportunity to build on the knowledge and skills she developed at Brooklyn College while gaining hands-on experience at the forefront of a rapidly evolving field where finance, technology, and human-centered innovation increasingly intersect.
The opportunity also reflects a broader employer network that has grown out of Pham’s spring 2026 CUNY AI Literacy and Professional Readiness Series. Industry partners, including DTCC returned throughout the program to work directly with students through mentoring, coaching, interviews, and career conversations. As students began moving into professional opportunities, those relationships expanded into employers’ wider networks, creating additional pathways for Brooklyn College and CUNY students, including connections with MetLife.
“For students, success today is not just about understanding a field, but about learning how to apply new technologies responsibly and creatively within it,” Pham said. “Dekena has demonstrated an exceptional ability to combine finance, technology, and critical thinking.”
