WHS grad completes internship with VonLehman CPA and Advisory Firm

Alec Poore is well known in Williamsburg and surrounding areas for being one of the top Yellow Jacket athletes to pass through the halls of WHS in recent memory. His overall ability helped the Jacket football, basketball and track & field teams enjoy great success during his time in orange and white, but these days he can be seen sporting a suit and tie as he seeks out the training and education necessary to become a leader in the world of business.

Poore, a soon-to-be junior at Eastern Kentucky University, has spent his summer in northern Kentucky where he has had the opportunity to sit under the learning tree of the men and women at VonLehman, a CPA and advisory firm located right on the Ohio River in Fort Wright.

Poore has been majoring in Risk Management and Insurance at EKU, and he plans to add a second major, Finance, this semester. During his recent internship at VonLehman, he was able to get hands on and put into practice much of what he has only read about up to this point. Working with an investment banking group, he was allowed to be directly involved with several processes including mergers and acquisitions, business valuations, and capital raising, among others.

This was Poore’s first-ever internship, running for three months between mid-May mid-August. During much of that time he stayed with family members who live in the northern Kentucky area. Reflecting back on the experience, he says that he definitely learned a lot.

“I had had a couple of accounting classes and one finance class,” Poore said of his knowledge coming into the internship. “But none of that came near the level of depth in this job. When I got there, I pretty much knew nothing. The first two weeks of training were done at home due to COVID, but after that I came up to the office full-time and dove in head first. I had to learn as quickly as possible in order to keep up, which turned out to be extremely rewarding. It was very much a hands on experience.”

“They definitely gave me the full experience,” Poore continued. “It exceeded my expectations. I learned so much.”

Much of what Poore was tasked with during his summer at VonLehman centered around formal financial modeling and helping to structure deals for buyouts. Analyzing financial data and presenting clients with important information that would assist them in planning for the future was a rewarding experience, he said, and it is something that he hopes to build a career out of once he is done with school.

“I am going to try to do another internship for investment banking next summer,” Poore said, adding that he’d like to visit a larger city next time. Nashville, Charlotte, and Chicago were all mentioned as potential landing spots.

Getting back to his time with VonLehman, Poore said, “This experience was awesome. I didn’t know going in exactly what they would have me doing, or how much I would be exposed to. But they got me right into the nitty gritty.”

“The people there are some fine folks,” Poore said of VonLehman. “They helped me tremendously with learning the job and gave me a push at times when things got difficult.”