By the end of my sophomore year, I had begun developing an interest inthe field of finance, so the selection in one of the oldest & largest investment management bank that has a legacy of 230 years with it was like a dream come true for me.
Welcome aboard
Unfortunately, the internship went virtual yet again this year because of the pandemic and so my dream of visiting Pune remains a dream till date 😔. The internship started on 18th of May. The onboarding session was a day long session with various events planned for us. It started with the welcome note by our hiring manager and we were given a glimpse of the amazing work culture and ethics in the organization. We then had insightful sessions where various industry leaders sharing their journey and experiences with us. To end the day, we had a session with the technical team to get us started with the virtual desktops and access to various other stuff. The day was awesome and the BNYM management made sure we didn’t miss the luxury of being physically present there.
Amazing folks
I was the part of the Data Vault team in the Asset Servicing Technology division. The amazing people whom I met there will always have a special place in my heart. I along with my co-intern Anoop were the two summer interns in the team. I must say that we were fortunate to start with Kunal as our manager. He was a constant support to us and was the go-to person whenever we were stuck at any point of time or needed any help or guidance. Our buddies, Sakshi & Harshita were very supportive to help us sail through the slightly painful task of initial environment setup and resolving our all silly doubts. My mentor Prem, was an always available to help person and got me through my initial stories to help me understand the project.
The Project
The Data Vault is an investment data platform by the BNYM Data Analytics & Solutions team that enables our client to adopt to vault as their data strategy or upgrade their existing data strategies so as to make the best out of their data to make informed decisions. Our team was working on the vault pipeline which was responsible for the acquisition & flexible warehousing of the data. Since the product we were working on was going to be generally available, we were given the stories that mainly revolved around the hardening of the platform for a seamless experience. Most of the tasks were backend and I primarily used Java & Springboot as techstack. I also got exposure to DevOps tools such as Jenkins, Sonarqube and the concepts of microservice architecture and cloud based services.
Explore, Learn, Grow
There were ample opportunities in the organization to connect with and hear from the top leadership. We had a monthly Tech-EC connect session and I was honored to hear from Bhargavi Ma’am (Head of Asset Servicing Technology in BNYM) about her journey & experiences. She guided as to how we should approach our internship and the corporate world in general as freshers. There were Executive Connect sessions at the global level for the complete batch of summer interns across all countries and we got a chance to connect with the global leadership of BNYM as well. BNYM also provides access to Pluralsight & Saba, which had some amazing courses and really helped me to skill up as per the requirements of the project and financial industry.
Fun Sessions
Although, everything was completely virtual, the management ensured that we did not miss out on the fun part and made some memories to cherish upon. There were a couple of intern connect sessions during December & March before the start of our internship so that we can get to know about our fellow interns. There were a few sessions in which we played games like dumb charades and scribble.
Final Presentation
At the last leg of our internship we had to present our work before the panel that comprised of people mainly from the top India leadership of the company. I was initially a bit nervous but the mock before my manager Anitha Jothi filled me with enormous confidence. The feedback she gave on my presentation and work were very satisfactory to me. The presentation before the panel also went very smooth and I was well able to cover all aspects of my internship. The comments from the panel were highly satisfying.
After such a good experience in my internship, I was quite hoping for the PPO and those hopes turned into reality a week after the end of my internship with the mail from Office of CCD, IIT Guwahati. Congratulatory messages were pouring in from my friends, seniors & juniors. It was such an amazing feeling.
Finally, I would like to conclude with the fact that this summer has been an amazing experience for me😊. The transition from finding connected components in a graph to working on solving real world problems is the best part that the summer internship provides.
A small learning I would like to share for people going to make their first corporate appearance the next year:
Always have the bigger picture with you of whatever work you are doing and how it going to impact the lives of the target audience and the value your work adds to your organization.
To people, especially my batchmates & juniors who are yet to land into an internship/job offer:
The whole process expects you to be patient and humble. You might be having failures coming your way initially but you need to hang around to play your perfect shot. Reach out to your friends if you feel low. Don’t forget to celebrate their success. Learn from your mistakes and keep improving. You are thankfully part of the system that provides you with ample number of opportunities. Always have that belief — You can & You will😊
