Our Interns Expected Spreadsheets. They Got Clinicals.

“That meeting changed my life. AI is not going to replace you anytime soon.”

The Truman Wealth team and our summer interns at Kids at Heart, the gala benefiting our local children’s hospital, July 31, 2026. Yes, that is a different Truman.

I have been doing this long enough to know what it looks like when a weight comes off somebody. The shoulders drop about an inch. They sit back in the chair. Sometimes they laugh at nothing in particular.

What I had never watched before was what that looks like on an intern seeing it from the far end of the table.

Payton Doege, one of Truman Wealth's current interns, caught me after that meeting and he was not entirely composed about it. What he said was: “That meeting changed my life. AI is not going to replace you anytime soon.”

I have thought about that sentence all summer. Half of me was moved. The other half was thinking, well. He thought it might.

Here is the thing nobody tells you about training people in this business. Nursing students and medical students do not learn their work from a textbook. At some point the lectures stop and somebody hands them a real patient, in a real room, with a real problem, while a person who knows what they are doing stands close enough to catch it if it goes sideways. They call it clinicals. It is the entire hinge of the training.

We do not have a word like that in financial services. We have “internship,” which sounds like filing.

So at the end of the summer I sat down with Payton Doege and A’briya Colone (our other intern) and asked them a pile of open-ended questions. What did you think this job was? What is it actually? Why us? What should the next student look for? I have cleaned up their grammar and otherwise left them alone.

The Textbook and the Mannequin

Both of them showed up with a picture in their head. Both pictures were wrong in the same direction.

Payton’s was structural. He had deliberately stepped off the investment banking track and assumed wealth management would be asset management with better hours. Portfolio construction, risk, the machinery. A spreadsheet and a calendar.

“Some of that does apply,” he said. “What surprised me was how much interaction goes into each client. Every meeting is a new life event, or a new problem, or a new accomplishment. I’ve sat in on days where you see the worst thing that’s happened to somebody and the best thing that’s happened to somebody, and it’s the same afternoon.”

A’briya’s picture was cultural, and she had been coached into it by people who meant well.

“I expected we’d mostly be given tasks to complete and then move on to the next thing. Not very hands-on, not in client meetings. I’d been told that was the standard expectation for an intern, that any client interaction would be with a mock client, and that finding a firm that offered anything else would be nearly impossible.”

A mock client. Which is to say: a mannequin. Every nursing student in America practices on one, and every nursing student in America can tell you the exact moment the mannequin stopped being useful.

“Truman did the opposite,” she said. “They put us in as many meetings as they could so we could listen in and get firsthand experience. And there were times we got to take the lead on our own projects and have more ownership over the work. I really enjoyed that responsibility, because it let me apply what I’d learned in class, make my own decisions, and feel like I was contributing to the team instead of completing tasks I’d been assigned.”

If you are reading this from a computer lab in Cornell Hall, that is the misconception worth correcting. Payton’s word going in was relaxed, and he meant the hours, and the hours are real. The work is not relaxed. Every person who sits down across from you is carrying something, and there is no version of this job where somebody else notices it for you.

Choosing Your Teaching Hospital

Here is the part I did not expect and enjoyed enormously.

“Truman initially was not on my radar during my internship search,” Payton said. “I had a list of companies I planned to talk to at the Trulaske career fair. After visiting the companies on my list, I talked to Mindy and it just felt right to apply.”

Read that again. He finished his entire list first. I was the afterthought table.

I am putting that in writing on our own website because I want the next Payton to understand how this actually works. You will not research your way to the right place in advance. The list is a starting point, not an answer. You find the right place by talking to people and paying attention to what your gut does in the ninety seconds afterward.

A’briya’s process was more deliberate, and it came down to one thing.

“The biggest advantage Truman had was knowing I’d be in client meetings, working on real people’s financial plans and not just case studies, which is all I was doing in class. That’s very hard to come by as an intern. I was excited to apply everything I’d learned and see how those concepts show up in people’s everyday lives.”

The second draw was that the rotation did not end in August.

“Being able to continue during the school year is extremely uncommon. There aren’t many opportunities like that in Columbia, and even when companies do offer internships, they often don’t keep interns through the school year. Most wait until you graduate to hire you full-time. Staying on means I keep learning, take on more responsibility, and keep building relationships with the team and with clients.”

That is residency, and she went looking for it on purpose.

She also wanted small, and she went in clear-eyed about what small costs you.

“I knew I didn’t want to deal with a corporate environment. I was a little worried about the different hats you have to wear at a small firm, but I also knew it would be a rewarding challenge and eye-opening to see everything it takes to not only be a good advisor but also run a business.”

Both of them are staying on through fall and spring. Neither of them had to.

Bedside Manner

I asked them each for one specific moment. Not a highlight reel. A moment.

Payton’s was the meeting I opened this post with. I am not going to describe the situation, because it was not his and it was not mine. It belonged to the person in that chair. What I can tell you is that it was complicated, it was painful, and it had been sitting on them for a very long time.

“We did the work we needed to do on our end and then explained the next steps in the process,” is how Payton put it. “After the meeting it seemed like the client got a weight off their shoulders that they’d been carrying for a long time. It was great to be a part of that and see the work the advisors at Truman Wealth do in real time.”

He had come out of a curriculum where the objective is to increase shareholder value. Then he sat in a room where the objective was one specific person’s ability to sleep at night. Those are not the same math, and there is no lecture that teaches you the difference. There is only the room.

A’briya’s moment went the other direction, and I think it is the better story.

She sat through an entire consultation process with a prospective client, not knowing whether they would end up being a fit for the firm. They went through all of it. And at the end, the answer was no. They were not going to become a client.

“What stood out to me most was seeing how relieved they were to realize things were better than they had thought,” she said. “It was also nice knowing this isn’t something a lot of firms would take the time to do. Even though we knew they might not become a client, we still wanted to help and make sure they left the process with a better understanding of where they stood. Being able to provide that value, even without them becoming a client, made the experience feel even more meaningful to me.” (Note: Individual outcomes vary and this example is not representative of every client or prospective client experience. Neither direct nor indirect compensation was provided in exchange for this testimonial/endorsement)

She is right that it is uncommon. She is wrong that it is generosity.

A good doctor who examines you and says you don’t need surgery has not wasted the appointment. That is the appointment. It only looks like a loss if you were being paid by the operation. We are a fee-only fiduciary firm, which means nobody here is paid by the operation, which means an hour spent on somebody who will not become a client is not a leak in the model. It is the model.

A Field Guide for the Next Rotation

I asked what the next student should look for. A’briya answered like somebody who had built a spreadsheet about it, because she had.

“It depends on what you want and what will help you achieve your overall goals. First decide the goals you have for your career. Then have a clear vision of what type of internship will best help you and what the requirements are. But also know your priority levels, so you can determine what you’re willing to compromise on.”

Her own non-negotiables: she did not want Missouri to be her only option after graduation, and she wanted a place small enough to actually need her.

Then two screens I would put on a poster in the career center.

Do they have a clear outline of what the job actually is?

Do their core values line up with yours?

Payton’s version was blunter. Some people genuinely thrive in fast-paced corporate environments, he said, and they should go do that. He wanted job security and a work-life balance that was at least a work in progress.

Then he said the thing I would frame if he would let me: choose the firm that values the client over selling you a product, and you get to grow with the firm instead of behind it.

The Chart Is the Easy Part

I asked what values they share with us. Payton went to coachability, and to being willing to be open about your own financial life. If you have ever tried to be coachable about money, you know that is harder than it sounds.

A’briya went somewhere I did not expect.

“One of the biggest values I share with Truman is joy. And it’s not just about clients having joy because they feel confident in their finances or because of a client event. It’s also about the joy of the employees. When employees genuinely enjoy what they do and enjoy working with each other, that naturally carries over to the clients.”

Joy is one of our three stated values. I have written it on documents. I have said it out loud in meetings. I have never once heard it explained back to me that well, and certainly not by somebody who got here in June.

So here is what an internship program taught me, which is not what I signed up to learn.

Payton arrived thinking a machine might be able to do this job. That is not a naive thing to think in 2026. A model can build a portfolio. A model can run a tax projection. A model can read the chart, and honestly, a model could probably tighten up this blog post.

What a model cannot do is sit in the room while somebody’s shoulders come down an inch.

That is the part you can only learn at the bedside. It is why we put our interns there in the first place, and it is the single best argument I have for why this work is going to be worth doing for a very long time.

If You Are the Next One

We will be recruiting again. If you are a student who would rather be in the room than adjacent to it, we would like to hear from you.

And if you are reading this as a client: these are the two people who have been quietly preparing your meetings all summer. You have been in better hands than you knew.

One last thing about the photo at the top of this page.

It was taken on July 31 at Kids at Heart, the gala benefiting our local children’s hospital. Payton and A’briya are both in it, because of course they are. We take them everywhere.

I did not set out to write a post about medicine. But I will point out that every nurse and every doctor in that hospital did clinicals too. Somebody let each of them into a room before they were entirely ready, stood close enough to catch it, and let them find out for themselves what the work costs and what it gives back. Nobody learns that part from a textbook. Not in medicine, and not here.

LIVE A WEALTHY LIFE, MY FRIENDS.

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