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Hey guys, I’m Tanmay, a to-be fourth year in the Department of Chemical Engineering. The guys asked me to put something interesting about myself here so here we go. [Error 404]. Bad joke but let’s not address it and move on.
I interned at the FX Options Trading Desk in the Global Markets Division for Barclays Investment Bank in Mumbai.
I was interested in Finance since my freshman year, probably because the word sounds fancy, kinda like one of the institute buzzwords (looking at you consult). I didn’t have a clear idea of what all opportunities the field contained, so I just tried to do a variety of (somewhat random) projects like SoS, apping to IIM profs (which failed miserably), and taking courses that would help me do projects in the related field. My minor in CMInDS helped me to some extent, and I had a self-project on my resume till the time I had to submit my resume for internship season. Apart from that, I actively traded in the Indian equity markets, which would help my case in interviews, but not something you could properly flaunt in your screening resume.
Now coming to the role, I’ll go into detail about the different roles that come under ‘Finance’ during the intern season, and the companies which come for those
Quantitative Strategy (APT Portfolio, Morgan Stanley, Graviton and other HFTs)
Global Markets a.k.a. Sales & Trading (Barclays, Deutsche Bank, Morgan Stanley)
Private Equity (Faering Capital)
Miscellaneous
My work was in the Global Markets division of Barclays. It was a great experience, but more on that later.
Coming to the selection process and my experience with it, I had a shortlist and 3 rounds of interviews at Deutsche Bank on Sunday. I’d attempted the Barclays just a couple of days before, not thinking about it much, because I was focused on Deutsche. Sunday came, I gave 3 rounds, got rejected, consequently spent the next day being gloomy when I received a call around 7PM that I had an interview at Barclays the next morning. At this point I didn’t think I could do anything, didn’t bother doing any company-specific prep (values) all of which I did with DB. Anyway, I laid out my shirt and a blazer (veryyyy important), and got up in time the next day. The interviews went well, I was asked questions mainly from my resume in the 1st round. The 2nd round was a bit tricky, most questions were based on Macroeconomics (stuff taught in HS101 2nd half, so pay attention kids), but macro mainly because I was being considered for a role in the FX team. The last round was an MD round which majorly consisted of HR questions, nothing too difficult. 3 rounds were done by lunch, after which I attended classes and gave the test for Faering because I wasn’t sure about getting into Barclays. In the evening, I got a message from a friend congratulating me, which is how I knew I’d done it. Checked the blog to confirm, and then had a sigh of relief, because in my head, ‘Intern season ka BT khatam’.
After the dust settled, I was left a little dissatisfied, because:
Why couldn’t I make it to Deutsche?
The stipend for Barclays was a little less (75k/month at the time)
Regardless, as I couldn’t do anything at the time, I sent the acceptance mail, poured myself some whisky, and relaxed for the 1st time in a while.
I’ll cover resume building and a few other things quickly. Check your seniors’ resumes, you can try to recreate some of their points. Otherwise, ask them for help with framing points. Ask your DAMP mentor, or just ping random seniors, they’d love to help you out. Btw, my stipend increased to about 1.36L/month when I joined, which was honestly a huuuuge incentive to work even harder. Now actually moving on to what I did for 8 weeks -
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The Internship -
The office was in Goregaon, I lived in the institute itself for 8 weeks. It’d take me about 45 minutes to get to the office, but the good thing about working in a European bank? You get to work European hours, and mine were 12PM to 10PM everyday. So no waking up early :).
There was no proper training session when we joined, we were allotted our desks (not in a literal sense, here desk stands for team), and our projects. From the 2nd day, we were free to start working on the project, and our project managers would guide us as to how we were to proceed at various stages. The work wasn’t very hectic, you could take breaks as you liked, and still get the work done. Sometimes I’d stay till 11 if I was realllllyy in a mood to work, but that wasn’t often and it wasn’t necessary either.
The culture at Barclays was amazing. I couldn’t have imagined people being so nice in a corporate environment, and everyone from your own team to teams who sat on the other side of the office, were extremely friendly and approachable. In terms of freedom, my project wasn’t very open ended but I was always motivated by my team to add my own contribution to it, apart from whatever was assigned to me by my stakeholders, which was great because once it was done, I could flaunt that I’d added something extra to the project, but also bad because it took a lot of work to be able to come up with something that’ll be useful and implementable within the given time frame. But my team was always there to support me.
One thing I really liked about my internship was we have business overview sessions where directors from different desks would come and talk about what their desk did. I got to know about so many different businesses like FX, Rates, Electronic Trading, Equites, Credit, Delta One, Prime Services, etc. A lot of big words, but trust me, the way those directors explained their work helped us a lot in understanding.
Coming to benefits, we had free lunch and dinner at the office, and the food was much much better than the mess. Apart from that, you’d get cabs to go back to your home, but coming to the office was something you had to arrange for yourself. We were obviously given goodies and stuff because that’s something all corporates do.
To sum up my project in a nutshell, it was to calibrate overnight Implied Volatility Curves for specific currency pairs using a strategy implemented using a straddle. So full of jargons I know, but if I try to explain then this’ll become too long. But feel free to contact me if you want to learn about the project itself. The broader goal of the project, like any project in a bank, was to make more money.
I got to meet a lot of interesting people during my internship, including my project manager and the VP of my desk, who told me about their past jobs as traders trading commodities and FX. I wish I could share them but those were borderline collusion or just ripping off clients so I’ll not go into any more details.
After going to the office for 8 weeks, one thing I realized, which is something very important, is I can do this for a living. And by ‘this’ I meant 2 things : A corporate job, and that too only in finance. And that is something I’ll keep in my mind when/if I sit for placements, or apply for any job in the future.
I’ll end this with a little piece of advice for ya’ll, if you are targeting a company, there is no better way to prepare for it than talking to seniors who worked there, especially for finance, because this is a domain regarding which absolutely nothing is taught in our coursework, apart from a little bit of HS101. So talk to seniors, build your resume based on what companies like, and machado! :)