-Raghav Agrawal(2021)
Hello all, I hope everyone is safe and doing well. This blog is from a person who was as clueless, if not more, as some of the people who will be reading this when trying to crack an internship. I’m Raghav Agrawal, a final year undergrad from the Chemical department (obviously ChEA blog mei padh rahe ho :P), and I am a summer intern at the FinMechanics I would say first and foremost that whatever guidance any Tom, Dick, and Harry senior gives to you, think of it as a double-edged sword, as it will contain a lot of helpful information but, at times, it will be demotivating as well. There are some norms built around some profiles that you have to be a certain way (read machau) to get into so and so field. But that is not the entire truth. I feel you don't need to have the same qualifications as the senior you talked to. It is good to have them but not entirely necessary.
Intern Season Pressure: I started preparing for my intern season initially by gaining all the technical skills I was interested in: probability and finance. Along with working on my interests, I also started reading about puzzles, and you don’t have to be a master of puzzles from the get-go. You will develop an intuition of them by practicing those repeatedly. Here “Practice makes Perfect” literally applies. Other than that, I started reading various HR questions that are asked in interviews. Mainly on the HR side, make a general document for it having generic questions. After you get shortlisted in a company for an interview, edit it according to the company specifically. I suggest doing this because you usually do not have a lot of time between getting your shortlist and the interview (in my case, it was around 12-15 hours on average). Coming to my internship, I got it through Placement Cell. I remember thinking that this company is far out of my reach (aukat ke bahar) because I consulted some “seniors” who said that you need a great CPI to get into finance. I was interested in finance early on (being baniya ig), but I was getting signals from everywhere that you need at least 8+ if not 8.5+ CPI even to get a shortlist in finance. And before this, I got shortlisted in two core companies and went deep into the selection process. Core or Finance? So I got shortlisted earlier for Hindustan Unilever in the supply chain and Piramal in pharmaceuticals. I think I got rejected because of my knowledge in core (or lack thereof). It was very demotivating to face rejection, but in hindsight, I think it was good for me personally because I got into the industry I was genuinely passionate about. As they say “Hindsight is always 20/20”. So I thought that I should leave finance and try for core, but then after giving numerous tests for various companies, I finally got my first non-core shortlist in FinMechanics, which I could have never imagined. We had two interview rounds, one was more of a technical round, and the other was primarily HR. Not lying, it was quite intimidating in the second round seeing 11 people sitting across the computer screen at midnight (yes, my second round was at midnight). We got our results approximately 45 mins after my interview. I had made my mindset that I was not capable of getting into finance because of all the noise in insti creating a stigma. It took me a week to let it sink in. My Work as an Intern: Coming to my internship experience, I will not bore you guys by throwing finance jargon. My internship mainly involved delivering the clients (investment banks in this case) with their financial trading requirements in the treasury department. The work culture in the firm was non-hierarchical, as most of the consulting firms are. There are mentors allocated to each intern who are the project managers as well, who are proactive in teaching all the work. They helped me clear my doubts at any given time of the day and made sure that I was catching up with them. I worked on various asset classes that the client operated on their investments. I learned a lot about how these institutional investors operate in their trades and hedges. Also, a lot of brainstorming went in when I got stuck at various places when implementing a particular financial instrument in an asset class. Ono, COVID! Initially, when I received the offer letter, it had mentioned an offline internship. So I was pretty excited to work in Mumbai, the heart of finance in India. I started dreaming about the workspace and being in the center of all the meetings and deals. But then, lo and behold, the second wave hit in April, and our internship was converted to work from home. At first, I was a bit underwhelmed that I would not be able to get the experience firsthand. However, when the internship started, I could not have been more satisfied with the interaction that I could have with people at the firm and the learnings that I was able to gather. Being engineering students, we are exposed to finance neither in college nor at our schools. As I was interested in finance, I started to study for FRM in my third year (which has been postponed because of COVID). So I tried to make myself familiar with the jargon a little bit. But the internship gave me a whole new and elevated experience of the real world, which was very much overwhelming in the beginning but later on, it kind of grew on me. Lastly, in my opinion, if anyone is sitting on the fence, they can always try consulting and finance as an option. If you have any further queries, feel free to hit me up. Cheers!