Intern Story #4: Adarsh’s Summer Internship @ Société Générale
I am currently a third-year undergraduate student at IIT Kharagpur. I was offered a summer internship by Société Générale through the campus placement cell. My previous experiences include a summer internship at SBI Capital Markets and a virtual consultant role at WorldQuant LLC. I am also a retail trader and I have made a decent amount of money!
When I was a freshman, nothing could have predicted my interest in finance. I used to come across articles about investing, stocks, commodities, etc that I could barely understand. I watched a few movies about Wall Street and it all seemed exciting even if I didn’t know the financial jargon. (I recommend you to watch the movie “The Big Short” someday).
I took up basic courses in economics and financial markets, started reading journals, and followed related pages on social media handles. I heard about the WorldQuant WebSim platform in my sophomore year. It was a great learning tool for me. In a few months, I was creating 2–3 trading strategies on WebSim each day. Thereon, I had a feeling I should consider a career in finance. Unfortunately, the platform has now been deactivated.
The whole application process for Société Générale was a great experience. The initial screening test consisted of a couple of basic coding questions and quant problems. After that, there were 3 rounds of interviews. I was asked questions from a wide range of topics including Linear Algebra, Probability Distributions, The Great Depression, etc.
SocGen wasn’t the first bank I interviewed for. I have had my fair share of failures in the past. Still, in the end, it all worked out just fine. The most important thing I learned was perseverance. You cannot let rejections bog you down. One of the multiple things candidates ignore during their preparation is getting themselves ready for the HR round. It’s a very important stage in the interview process. The generic questions asked in this round should not be answered generically! Some confident folks assume questions like “Why do you want to join our company?” and “Where do you see yourself in five years?” can be answered spontaneously. However, I disagree.
I realized there’s no point in fretting over one’s lack of preparation on the day of the interview. Have a relaxed and happy face throughout!
My SocGen internship is ongoing. I am working on a Machine Learning project. Working from home can be a little tough at times but its a unique experience after all. I find ways to stay productive despite the innumerable distractions! I have been working on a project wherein I have to extract client names from emails, PDFs, and images. I am using tools like OCR and NER to extract the information. The accuracy should be high for this model to work as this information is to be processed further to prevent security breaches. The different types of documents and the requirement of high accuracy with each one pose new challenges.
I have been given complete independence to use any tools required to produce results. I have been assigned mentors to guide me and give feedback on the methods I am using. It is almost the most amazing project I could have been assigned. It’s impactful for the company and independence that I have been given makes me feel as if it’s my personal project! To be able to apply things I have learned in the classroom to real problems has been a wonderful experience so far.
My Message to the Aspiring Interns in Finance:
1. Finance and Mathematics go hand in hand. Being good at solving puzzles and Probability and Statistics problems is critical.
2. The interviewers do not expect you to know the nitty-gritty of the industry. Still, if you decide to mention some courses that you might have taken, be sure you are well-versed with that.
3. Keep yourself updated by reading about recent market events. It’s also expected from a finance enthusiast to know about the major economic events in history.
4. Many a time it’s difficult to land an internship in big financial institutions without prior experience. That’s perfectly all right! Look out for startups, they offer a great learning environment.
5. Maintain a good academic record because many companies will judge you based on your GPA. Needless to say, communication skills are important.
6. The books Heard on the Street and Fifty Challenging Problems in Probability are great for practising puzzles and questions on probability respectively. You can pick up any undergraduate level Prob Stat book for revising the concepts. I read Introduction to Probability Models by Sheldon Ross and it was a pretty good book.
You can subscribe to FinShots and take up some online courses in finance. I am adding links to the courses that I found helpful:
Coursera Investment Management Specialization
MIT OpenCourseWare- Topics in Mathematics with Applications in Finance
For those of you who think its too late, I have a suggestion. I think that people get influenced by LinkedIn profiles boasting of glamorous internship experiences. Some people can achieve great things at an early stage in their career and some, well they just get lucky. None of that should bother us because everyone has a different story. Our sole focus should be to expand our knowledge and be a better version of ourselves each day, good things follow.
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