]]> http://insightiitb.org/internships/2009/09/results-of-our-summer-internship-survey/feed/ http://insightiitb.org/internships/2009/09/summer-school-at-the-london-school-of-economics/ http://insightiitb.org/internships/2009/09/summer-school-at-the-london-school-of-economics/#comments Wed, 09 Sep 2009 14:24:45 +0000 Ayush http://insightiitb.org/internships/?p=293 Introduction

The London School of Economics (LSE) offers certified summer courses in various subjects ranging from economics and finance to management and law, for a period of three weeks. The summer school, which begins in the first week of July, has around 5000 students from various parts of the world, majorly from India, China and the US. The application procedure and other details can be found on its website: http://www2.lse.ac.uk/summerSchool/Home.aspx.

In Class

There are three levels of courses, which run in the same way as full semester ones. Most 1st and 2nd level courses do not require any major prerequisites. The teaching pattern is similar to ours. But with three hour lectures, supplemented with one hour tutorial sessions daily, each day represents a week of lectures at IIT. Professors are generally good and provide a enjoyable learning experience. This city campus is not very big but is still well-equipped, especially the library. Apart from classes, LSE also organizes public lectures delivered by renowned speakers. The course tuition fee is 1,100 pounds.

Outside Class

Major hangout spots include two pubs within the campus itself. LSE, located in central London, is at walking distance from the River Thames and close to many major landmarks of the city. LSE also has its own accommodation facilities with walking distance from the campus. Other accommodation options in London can also be availed. There are student union disco parties every Friday night on campus LSE also organizes a River Boat Disco party on the River Thames. Apart from that, London and its famous nightlife provide a lot of scope for having fun.

Overall

Insightful interactions with students from various backgrounds and countries, an enjoyable in-class experience and the life in the city itself, make the overall LSE experience simply awesome.

The IIM Bangalore Campus:

The campus is very small but has better per capita infrastructure than our Institute. No two place are more than 5 minutes away on foot. The hostels are quite decent with cozy, single occupancy rooms, 24 hour LAN, washing machines and internal phones on each floor. The atmosphere is really peaceful and the surroundings green and clean. The only problem is the lack of a proper canteen! They have Amul, Tata Tea and CCD outlets but you can’t have sandwiches at Amul everyday — although that’s what we had to do for two months! (yes, there were 5 others from the Institute at IIM-B). And dinner was always at some roadside restaurant outside campus. Seriously I would have been bored to death had it not been for our weekend “lukkhas” with others from the Insti doing their interns all over Bangalore. Other than Bangalore we had covered Ooty, Mysore, Pondicherry and Hogenakkal, each on separate weekends.

The Work:

I was supposed to be working on a case study on Aptech’s business strategies which was supposed to be completed in 8 weeks but due to Aptech’s other commitments it got delayed. So basically I was left doing “arbit” and random stuff. Most of the time was spent on reading subject matter and writing summaries. This wasn’t bad because it definitely gave me a good exposure towards marketing but there wasn’t any tangible gain.

Overall, it was a nice experience especially because of the weekend outings and I got a feel of what management was all about.

BACKGROUND

This summer, I completed an internship at a firm known as “Nomura” as part of the Change Management Team (CMT). Before I get into the details of what the CMT is and, I’d like to provide some background on the company itself. Primarily operating in Japan, Nomura is an Investment Bank that came to the global forefront after its acquisition of the European and Asian Operations of Lehman Brothers, the Investment Bank that went bankrupt in September, 2008. Lehman operated a Captive Unit in Powai, Mumbai which mainly serviced the European and Indian Front Office Operations of the Firm. Under this deal, the Powai entity was also to be taken over by Nomura. Nomura themselves had no presence in India prior to this.

To service their large, not to mention very profitable front offices, such companies set up Operations Divisions consisting of Middle and Back Offices, Finance and IT, which execute processes that are continuously running behind the scenes. Captive units opened in developing countries such as India represent a major cost arbitrage to these Firms, who can save as much as 50% by simply moving (read outsourcing) their operations here. The Powai Office itself has a strength of 2500 Full Time Employees (FTEs). Note that apart from the above mentioned support divisions, Powai also has an Investment Banking Centre, where one can find Front Office Investment Bank work outsourced, a Global Markets centre, where one can find Equity Research, Equity & Fixed Income Quants, Structuring Teams (as those mentioned by Pupun & Rohit). For that matter, these are the teams which guys from the IITs and IIMs join. Lehman also had an India Front Office in Worli mainly dealing with Indian Investment Banking and Trading/Sales. I am not aware of any person from an IIT who worked there immediately after graduation.

THE ROLE OF CMT

Now given the scale of these operations, the split of work between the Regional & India offices, the continuous new stream of work being migrated, there exists a clear business case for the CMT. Who are parts of CMT and what do they do? CMT has three sub-divisions - Transitions, Business Analytics and Quality. Transitions, deals with deciding which new processes are to be “transitioned” from the Region to the Powai Office and also seeing these through till they are performed in Powai as Business as Usual. Business Analytics assists operations with the implentation of any Process Improvement projects. Quality (which is the team I was part of), deals with understanding processes, their core & auxiliary aspects, and identifying areas of improvement. In other words, CMT is essentially an inhouse consulting group comprising of Six Sigma Master Black Belts (the highest formal educational qualification in consulting) and Business graduates (MBAs) who are substitutes for large consulting firms like Opera, Deloitte and the like. Essentially, CMT is the in-house consulting group with different functions of the Operations division as its clients. Also notice the similarity between Manufacturing Processes and Financial Processes. The entire concept of a Quality team is borrowed from the Manufacturing Industry. And, as it turns out so are most of the people. You can find ex-ITC, ex-P&G and ex-GE people working in this team after having performed similar tasks in the manufacturing sector.

What does CMT do? Due to the very scale and split of operations/IT, there exist many situations, where improvements maybe possible, either in the processes itself or in systems. CMTs role is to identify these opportunties by in-depth studies, suggest changes and lead any initiatives which are begun as a result. As it turns out, most of these projects require specialized knowledge – they cannot be done without knowledge of the process which only comes with having worked on the process first hand. As a result CMT also has to drive participation of line managers in these initiatives, without which, they cannot be done. In management lingo, this is what is known as “Project Management”. For the same reason, it is strongly advised to join a role in a quality team after one has gained some experience in the field, the requisite people skills and analytical mindset. In an ideal world, one would not need a CMT. But as it turns out, Process Managers in Operations tend to be very occupied (to say the least) in their day to day routines. In absence of strong leadership and mandates, they fail to devote time to activities such as this, to the extent that they don’t perceive value in the initiatives at all. Thus, the CMT comes into being. It tends to be a team leveraged by Senior Management to drive large scale changes in parts of the organization.

IN CONCLUSION

However, the criticisms of CMT are similar to those of consulting – lack of understanding of the practicalities of the business, theoretical improvement schemes, not practically implementable and the like. But in the right company, having the right mandates and senior management support, the work can be a great value addition.

The reason for my staying back in the Institute was largely due to the following factors:

a) My department made it compulsory for us to do an aero-internship and I didn’t have the guts to get a “farjee” or a fake certificate.

b) My professor made me an offer I couldn’t refuse; he said to me  — “You complete this project and you will definitely have a publication to your name”. This got me carried away and I started building castles in the air with thoughts ranging from how future generations would search for my name on Scopus for my research work, to how I actually contributed positively to the field of science after 3 years in IIT. Primarily it was about the fact that I could enjoy how much ever I wanted and do work at my own speed with no pressures and tensions.

My professor made it very clear in the first week that I could work as much as I wanted and that there was no need for a hurry.  While most people would see this as the opportunity to cut slack and relax, I took this opportunity to learn and sharpen my skills as much as I possibly could.

The project was titled “Flame propagation in radial micro-channels” and dealt with simulating flames in radial micro-channels. The projected involved numerical methods, coding on C++ and usage of plotting software (I used this brilliant plotting software called DPlot). The numerical method used for the simulation was the Predictor-Corrector method and I had used it for 100,000 grid points for varying time cycles ranging from 10,000 to 50,000 time cycles. I had initially worked on a 1D case and then perfected the code so that it could be implemented for a 2D case. While coding for the 1D case was easy, the 2D case was tricky and I had to use all the help I could get from the few CS junta to make the code efficient and look better. Eventually code ran without glitches and generated interesting results which are being investigated further and I will be working on this through the current semester.

This was my first attempt at research and I enjoyed it. This was largely because of the  stress free environment I got to work in and also because of the continuous motivation from my professors’ end. Contrary to most peoples’ belief that the institute is a “boring” place to work in, I found it to be the best place to work in.

In addition to the work, I spent countless hours watching plays in Prithvi, on a couple of treks, lazed around, chilled with friends and went to town every weekend. It was possibly one of my best summers.

]]> http://insightiitb.org/internships/2009/08/the-iitb-experience/feed/ http://insightiitb.org/internships/2009/08/novartis/ http://insightiitb.org/internships/2009/08/novartis/#comments Wed, 05 Aug 2009 14:50:36 +0000 Rajan Seth http://insightiitb.org/internships/?p=255

After loads of nerve-wracking, I finally landed an internship at Novartis. Novartis is one of the biggest multinational companies and I was working in its Vaccine and Diagnosis division. The plant was in Ankleshwar (Gujarat).

Ankleshwar is a small industrial town near the banks of river Narmada. GIDC is an industrial area housing this place, and has more than 1400 chemical industries in all. You can just imagine the level of pollution there. All the smell (obnoxious, pungent, sharp etc) which you might have heard of while learning inorganic chemistry came flooding back to my memory. Anyway, this is what the industrial areas are like. All the big players in the core chemical industry from Asian Paints to Bayer to Aventis to ONGC can be found here.

The main product of the plant I worked at is the Rabipur Vaccine, which is a vaccine for Rabies. There are only 2 plants across the globe which produce this vaccine, the other one being in Germany.

Life on the plant
The first 15 days were all about introductions to the people and the workings of our plant. We went to all the sections from Production to Engineering to Quality and it was fascinating to see how  the entire department worked together. The vaccine came under the header of life saving drugs, so the quality of the product was of utmost priority for the plant. One thing one should keep in mind is that when you go to any place for an internship, you end up taking your brand name with you, whether you like it or not. Always remember that guys in the corporate world think that we have loads of brain and a high intellectual level (just an emotional way to exploiting us :P). Anyway, I was given a project in the QA (quality assurance) department. The best part of the internship was seeing and realising that the projects given were actually useful and of some worth to the plant. My project included planning and reviewing “Deviations and CAPA management”, finding potential gaps in it and how to fill them. Finally, I came up with some good ideas. We worked on a VBA code and made a very efficient excel sheet which could update entries automatically. I tell you one thing-these guys in industry become very happy with us if we do even a tiny bit of work which shows. These sheets shaved hours and hours off the routines of quite a few employees, essentially automating whatever data-entry used ot be done manually till now. Recently I came to know that those excel sheets have been implemented on their LANs and it gives me great satisfaction now.

Life apart from work
The weekend just consisted of Sundays and we never missed our opportunity to explore new places. I visited Daman, Vadodara, Surat and Ahmadabad and one thing I can say for sure is that Gujarat is the best place to live (just leave the fact that it’s a “dry” state ). I had one of my friends in Vadodara and visited him frequently. The city is seriously good. Not that big, not that populated but still modern enough for a very good life style. One of the beautiful places near Ankleshwar is “Kabirvad” situated on the banks of Narmada. The only sources of entertainment were the multiplexes there.

Finally I had a very nice overall experience in Novartis and I think that Pharmacy is one of the best sectors for a chemical engineer. In all seriousness, there is huge money involved in this and the promise of a good future too. And best part is that it is recession free. For more details about pharmacy industries do contact me: rajan.iitb@gmail.com

Before the intern, my idea was that we would be taught methods of predicting movements of prices of various stocks in this intern and that people do this all the time and earn a lot of money. Well, that’s not how it works in that one cannot actually predict the stock price, but one can earn a lot of money here and that takes skill. What actually is done is you design some indicators that give you a “hint” as to which way the prices are going to move. Some simple examples are intuitive enough to understand like if the price steadily increased for many days, chances are high that it will go down the next day. Things like that and more. So you try to use the data that you already have and try to find such directions in which the market is headed and use it to your advantage. Only difference being that instead of people interpreting these indicators, it was the computer that was supposed to take decisions of buying and selling, of course based on what you have told it to do, but on thousands of stocks. So here’s what my intern looked like.

All of this starts with getting familiar with the terms used. There aren’t too many terms and most of them are very logical so there is no problem in grasping them. Others are statistical tools that gauge your performance. The most important one that I used for was the Sharpe ratio and the information ratio. After that came the indicators. The first week generally goes into understanding the basics and all. It’s not that it takes that long to understand it but it does take a while to actively apply them. What we basically did was get familiar to the most popular of the indicators and how they are used to judge the prices.

The second week went in understanding the basics behind the indicators. It’s easy to make one but it is essential to understand the working especially if you want to improve the indicator, which is what we are looking for. Any one indicator cannot be trusted all the time, especially in the markets today that tend to go in one particular direction…down. Indicators are generally best in a steady or “sideways” market, where there is not clear trend. If there is any direction, it’s a different story.

Next comes using these indicators to actually buy stocks of appropriate companies. What I did was deal with 3000 stocks in the US and occasionally in other countries like Japan and European markets and came up with what is called an alpha for each of the stocks. Alpha in simple terms is relative probability of each stock to go up (or down). Relative to what?? Well… each other. It’s easy to talk in terms of 2 stocks but when 3000 stocks are to be considered, things are not as simple. You give each a number, indicative of how much probability that stock will have of going up. Someone else may be assigned a higher or lower number, which means that between the two, the higher numbered has a higher probability of going up. It looks simple enough but coming up with a simple formula can be a tough job, and boring too sometimes.

In the next week, we graduated to looking at blogs and articles on such things. By the end of 2nd week, I had taken to looking at chart patterns which I continued in the third week too. Chart patterns are basically formed by price vs. time graphs of a stock that are a direct effect of the psychology of humans. The “drive” that people get of buying and selling when someone like Harshad Mehta deals in a stock is a very good example of such a tendency. These are the factors that have nothing to do with the company or its performance or its expectation of doing good or bad. It’s just the herd mentality that we essentially have as traders. And analysing such patterns can be real fun.

Analyzing such patterns, I tried to make some of my own indicators, but landed up remaking a lesser known indicator. But it was great kick finding out that I was on the right track.

This went on for another week and by the end of it, I was begging my mentor for a change. So next week we took a break from this routine to do a small programming project. It involved making the best strategy for a famous casino game. Turns out even the simple games where you think casino can lose are made so that they never lose. The rules of the game ensure that. And doesn’t matter if the player wins or loses, at the end of the day the casino always wins. Unfortunately it took me a long time to realise that there was nothing wrong with the results I was getting in the simulations. I was meant to lose; I just had to reduce the loss. Once we were done with this in a couple of weeks, we got back to our previous task.

The next week I tried to combine more than one indicator, something that a trader usually does. Mostly, one would look at as many indicators as possible before one takes a decision. But doing this for thousands of stocks would take an insane amount of time or traders. However, if one can instruct a computer how to handle them correctly, one can trade at a higher frequency and for many stocks. The best multiple indicators for combining would be those based on completely different principles - things that do not have a common source of change. And if both of their predictions agree, then we would have a much stronger indication of an apparent trend. That being said, I really began to appreciate what our eyes can analyze in one glance because programming for just two indicators together was a pain. Only in the last week was I successfully able to combine two to make a useful formula.

In the end, I think I met most of the goals of the internship. I needed to make atleast 4 good formulae which I did, found out for myself that Bangalore IS expensive and got to know fellows from iit-d. It was a great learning experience.

• The Work Involved:

Ok lets get serious. They basically analyse a company’s organistional structure & the different employee profiles, after which they design and conduct ‘Interventions’. These Inteventions are basically workshops for emplyoees in which they are trained to function more efficiently (now you see why SBI is a client). Apart from being very very expensive (read: 9 figure consultancy fees) these are very well designed with trainers, videos, tool kits etc.
Now to what I did. I was part of a illustrious (read: IIM MBAs :P) team working on a ‘Career Design’ website for an European Investor. I cant for several reasons reveal details about the website but what I can do is descibe my experience. To be honest the two most important things you need to do well as a consultant is “Googling & Powerpointing”. Well what I mean is you have to know how to mine data, analyse it & present it effectively. When you communicate with clients you don’t have to use fancy english but you need to be very lucid i.e. you should literally be able to put your thoughts into bullet points & when you talk to consultants you’ll also notice they often use figures and flowcharts as well.
The work hours are as flexible as they get. 5 working days a week is a myth, hell you might have to work sundays as well if you are a full time employee. The intern was a lot of fun because of the company I had in terms of the team I was working with & overall it was a very wholesome experience.

So, today is basically my second-last day here (at Philips) and this is my last entry here (on this blog). The project has finished, i.e. my work in the project has finished, which did happen last week itself. I’ve been practically jobless for the past 7-8 days, but I don’t mind that at all. Now, I must admit that the last few days have been the best- we’ve had presentations (I didn’t make any), treats and cricket matches(at a field near the office). Our new head, who’s illiterate about India (he’s a European), tried his hand at cricket for the first time. His brief stint was quite impressive- he managed a second-ball duck (and not a first ball), he got catch-out (and not bowled) and he picked up a catch and fielded well. The whole match experience was great. The research team here has got some really nice people. So that ways, the work environment is good.

My opinion about the company has changed from ‘I hate this’ to ‘I don’t care’ to ‘This is ok’ to ‘I might consider it’. The projects these people are doing here are really interesting, everything being in the biomedical field. They’ve got projects on Heart-diseases, cancer detection, Pregnancy and child-care, etc. They’ve published some n papers during the development of each of these projects and looking at that I can say these guys are doing some productive work.

With the second quarter’s results showing some improvement, I expect the scale of projects to go up and some more interesting projects to be undertaken in the future. Hence, the future prospects look promising. Reputation-wise, there can be no complaints- Philips is a leading brand.

That’s all I guess. Tata.

I have a particular interest in Medicinal Chemistry even before I came to IITB. So I started applying for research internships during my second year for the following summer, and that is when I contacted this Prof. here at UoA. I should throw this out right now: Current state of research funding in the US  is horrible. Universities are closing down departments and cutting on graduate intakes rapidly, so be prepared if you receive a lot of negative replies. So I got a similar reply ( this was in Nov,2007), but the Prof. encouraged me to apply next year and if he had funding he would take me in. Finally, I ended up joining the Nucleic Acid Chemistry research group at IITB last summer, which turned out to be the best decision I ever made. This is my advice to anyone who is serious about going into research, join groups here and try to gain some experience. The internship should serve the purpose of consolidation, ultimately leading to a graduate school where you will have an advantage of knowing the field well and coming up with interesting projects. Back to the discussion, so I applied  again last December and this time luck favored me. I was accepted with full funding and a variety of projects to choose from.

I was basically accepted into a big collaboration, which spanned from UoA to Moffitt research center in Florida and has some 6 investigators working on it. The field is called ‘Peptidomimetics’ which is essentially synthetic peptides mimicking the function of naturally occurring  proteins. These can be used as drugs to target a variety of ailments, in my case the group works on Cancer as the target. The current work proposes a new route to target a variety of cancer receptors in tumor cells and the grant is around $800,000. Medicinal chemistry is definitely a growing field and provides attractive career options both in India and abroad. If you have an understanding of biomolecules, this may very well be what you are looking for.

The biggest hurdle I faced was time, I had to be here on May 18 and my papers arrived from US on May 6. It was due to a variety of factors: you are asked to submit a number of documents to the host in order to process the DS-2019 application and in my case, the final acceptance came in April. I had a backup option in Bremen,Germany in case this hadn’t worked out, so keep applying because you never know when things go wrong. Also, keep soft copies of your passport, proof of parental income, transcript and medical insurance ready so that you can cut down the delays. Getting a US visa is time-consuming but not hard, you should be prepared to answer any questions the interviewer may have and you’ll be set. I got my Visa on May 14, and four days later landed in the land of opportunity:USA.

The A-mountain in Tucson. This is also the official logo of UoA.

Tucson is the second largest city in Arizona after Phoenix, which is of course a mammoth in comparison. The Us-Mexican border is 100 km away, so the area has a pronounced hispanic population and culture, which is actually good for Indians as the Mexican culture is quite similar to ours, whether it’s family dynamics or culinary experiences. Only exception, they put beef in everything, so be prepared to spend a bit more on food if you respect the cow like me! Other than that, you have a chance to experience the excellent work the Indian exports are doing here. I am working with an Indian post-doc here and have seen countless Indians handling some of the most sophisticated projects. It is indeed inspirational to see the amount of success Indians have  achieved through hard work and dedication and the world salutes us for it. Everyone here is aware of the IITs and the grindstone we call ‘JEE’. I am reaching towards the conclusion of my project and my internship, but this experience has all but re-assured me that I stand to learn and enjoy as a researcher in the future. If you are uncertain about how you’ll end up after doing a Ph.D.,  it will be a very full-filling experience from what I have seen. Hope this has been an interesting read and do post comments if you wish to.

Later!

An internship is that summer when your seniors suddenly transform from lukkha geeks into bonafide been-there-done-that studs, bursting with fundae, money, and for the lucky ones, PPOs. Case in point.

My 2 cents.

Where?

Barclays Capital, Mumbai.

How?

They came. They interviewed. And in a moment of colossal stupidity, they chose.

What?

Investment Banking, duh.

Ya, right.

Investment Banking is banking for the rich. That’s how somebody explained it to me, before the aforementioned interview, and I did not believe it. It could not be. That so many bright people led such glamorous lives of glorious debauchery doing such simple, mundane work. I cooked up several complex definitions over the last year, before coming full circle into understanding that I-Banking is indeed, banking for the rich.

• As an analogy with the regular bank people we meet, in I-Banking too, there are relationship managers, sales people and ecommerce platforms, that liaise with clients - corporates, governments, institutional investors, wealth management companies, hedge funds and other I-banks. Making gross simplifications, as with normal banks, these clients are looking to either a) Invest  money they already have or b) Get money (loans) to invest in plans they already have. What Ibanks do is try and move money from a) to b).

• As with banks, there are those people who help the sales people in suggesting a loan/product that would fit the client’s needs - the sales and structuring departments.

• And finally, actually executing the product. IPO, Bond Issuance in case of a loan (Category b). Trading in liquid markets such as equities (stocks), foreign exchange, other commodities,  in case of investment (Category a). Trading is done in the market in such a way that the clients get their required returns; The way in which it is to be traded, is decided by the structurers. The actual trading is done by, well, traders. Traders have some of the toughest and most stressful jobs in the industry. In very liquid markets, prices move very rapidly by the clock tick and trying to maintain a position, booking profits needs quick decisions, some algorithmic strategies, a good sense of the underlying economics, and common sense.

Is that all?

No. The above departments make-up the so-called front office of I-banks. As with any other bank / company, you would need an army of  people - the so called middle and back office.

• The operations guys - who actually execute all market orders, book trades, after sales/trading has given the order
• The product control guys - who check that nobody’s cheating the company
• Compliance/legal  - headmasters who ensure we are within bounds of the law
• IT - the software guys,
• Risk management - who’ll tell us whether or not we can take the risk of doing a particular deal with a particular client etc. etc.
• Research - who publish research reports for clients

Also, due to oversimplifying, I might have left out quite a few departments which do not come under broad classifications, one key example being Mergers & Acquisitions (M&A)

So, where’s the big deal?

The amount of money, and the increasing complexity of products, is mind-boggling. With clients looking for smarter ways to invest more money, Ibankers came up with ideas to create extremely complex and sometimes outrageous products. This coupled, with the fast paced deal-to-deal based style of working, as opposed to a research or process based style, has led to a projection of glamour, riches, brains (not always - as seen in the recent credit crisis) and even a sense of mystery in media and peer groups.

Where do IITians come in?

IITians’ quantitative analytical skills make them ideal for the complex structuring and other trading based jobs, especially if the products in question are exotic derivatives kind of stuff. The job could include use of stochastic modelling of stock markets to predict returns, find probabilistic future payoffs for a product bought now, and models to calculate the fair price of a product. Or analysing data and using models and extrapolation to come up with research reports. Or building algorithmic trading strategies.

I worked in the Equity Derivatives Group as a structurer. My main project was to analyse feasibility and pricing a class of options (a type of derivative) called cliquet options using 2 mathematical models and suggest changes to adapt them to NIFTY. Cliquet options are  not sold in India currently. At the end of the project, I was to suggest a model to use to price and sell cliquet options on NIFTY in India. I had to make sure that the price wasn’t too conservative (too high), making it unsaleable or too competitive (too low). I used models used in Korean and UK markets and used a sort of trial and error method to come up with modifications. To test them, I applied the models to NIFTY historic data to come up with a safe fair price.

Lessons from the experience?

A lot. In terms of soft skills, life-lessons, this internship went a long way. If I had to enlist -

Professionalism - The foremost quality that any intern working in a decent professional environment would talk about. Keeping deadlines, working steadily and smartly instead of last minute night outs, rolling out complete usable-saleable deliverables, as opposed to half baked projects we do in IIT. A simulation of real-life corporate pressure if you are not delivering. Professional conduct and communication.

A lot about finance.

And the 2 most important tools in similar firms - Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Powerpoint.

Barclays as an experience?

Great. Barclays has in the past recruited for the Singapore IT office. Given that both of us were not very enthusiastic about the IT profile, we were lucky to be placed in a front office position.

There was a lot of time and money invested into our learning - there’s a two day training in investment banking from a reputed educational firm in the field in Singapore. A flat hierarchy meant that we got to interact with everybody upto Managing Directors, who not only gave a great bird’s eye view of the economy but also acted as guides in choosing career paths. The projects are actual products they are looking to sell and were great learning opportunities to understand the field and also know the state of the market. It was overwhelming to understand how such a huge globally spread behemoth works. For our projects, we could be talking to anybody from New York to Hong Kong to Tokyo on different days. Everybody is willing to take time out to help an intern.The best part, for me, was the people that we interacted with - some of the smartest, talented and most humble people who treated us with a lot of respect.

And it pays well.

Buzz Rohit, if you have any doubts. Apparently he is entertaining questions.

Barbarians, Butchers, Thieves, Investment Bankers- in literature, these terms have been used interchangeably. If there were a society of people which could be credited for the ‘Depression’ we saw last year, it has to be the I-Bankers. More precisely, a class of investments, Options and Derivatives, which allow you to realize gains (and losses) made for an investment of Rs. 100 by investing just Rs.10 (called ‘Leverage’). These were invented as tools to allow small players, who had a view but not the capital to encash it, try their luck. However, as history has it, even those who had the required Rs.100 capital to invest in an asset began playing the Options game, consequently risks, gains and losses all got magnified. Thanks to a very regulated market environment created by RBI in India, we were comparatively safe.

At Barclays, I am precisely contributing towards leading the world towards another Depression. I am placed at the Equity Derivatives Structuring Desk which focuses on making ‘products’ ( Trading Strategies and Ideas, Structures which deliver payout according to certain predecided rule) on Index and Derivatives.

To quickly lay the structure of a Typical Investment Bank- the main arms are:

Research

The Investment Banking Arm of Barclays Bank

Sales

Structuring

Trading

IBD

Treasury

Operations

Risk Management

Merger and Acquisition

Tech (typically, there are a lot of IIT guys here, tasks include software development and support)

Of these, Sales, Structuring, Trading, IBD, M&A classify as Front Office. Others form Middle and Back Office, avoiding their description here. So the Structuring team makes products, the Sales team pitches it to clients and once the trade is finalized, Trading comes into play.

I was assigned the task to make an algorithmic trading strategy on Nifty and wrap it in a Delta-1 note (you give me 100 bucks, I trade it according to my algorithm, at maturity you get all the amount). Given Nifty has delivered 11% annualized returns per annum, I was set a target of 15%. To answer how we know whether a strategy would do good or bad, we pretend to have invested in the markets in 1991 and then trade according to the strategy and see what we have in 2009. This is called back-testing.

By the end of a month, I had a strategy ready which delivered 17% returns on the backtest. However, it failed on a test and was deemed unfit to be launched as a product. I later did an extensive literature survey to prove that the test was not applicable to my strategy and any monthly trading strategy (which assumes direction for the whole month at a time) would fail it. By then however, I had already started on a new strategy. I now have a strategy which delivers 23% returns on Nifty and works on all other Asian Indices as well. I am now preparing the marketing pitch for it and if all goes well, it’ll be launched as a Barclays product across countries.

If you are wondering how a strategy is made, well, a large part of any trading strategy is predicting how the markets will behave in the coming time. And deep technical and fundamental analysis can be done for this. My strategy uses a combination of Technical Indicators intelligently for this and predicts direction with an accuracy of around 65% ( 50% is anybody’s guess, since we are making an educated guess we expect it to be better than 50%, every % thereof significantly contributes to your returns). However you need to be careful here that you do not introduce complexity into the structure for we have to sell it as well! Nobody would buy something he/she doesn’t understand.

That about sums it up. Still, if you think you want to know more on the subject, let me know.

And just in case you are curious about the dirtier side of I-Banking, you might want to watch ‘Barbarians at the Gates’ or read ‘Den of Thieves’. If you can’t find either, buzz me.

Cheers!

P.S. - Just in case you are looking forward to a career in I-Banking, get acquainted to working late hours and under severe pressure, they don’t pay you for nothing!

For starters, I joined my internship here at Hindustan Unilever Research Center (HURC), Whitefield, Bangalore on the 11th of May, ‘09. First step into this place and I was greeted with a gazillion safety rules - HUL is trying to become a zero injury company - walking within yellow lines and holding the staircase railing being the minimalistic of all.

Anyway, the company - it virtually has no competition in the market - Surf, Rin, Ponds, Dove, Sunsilk, Impulse… you name it and you’ll see a Unilever tag on it… and that’s exactly what I had in mind when I came here - and boy I wasn’t disappointed!

White lab coat clad, safety goggled individuals, swiping their ID cards at doorways, carrying test-tubes of liquids, scurrying along in their definitive lives… one glance at my lab (name not revealed due to a confidentiality agreement we signed on day 1) and i realized, this is the place i wanna be..rather - Industrial R&D is the place to be for me.

Application of your knowledge coupled with some sort of an economics estimate to things… optimizing is an important part of my project here and to be honest, this intern is something!

pykara lake, ooty

The Atmo :

Jovial, cooperative and excessively knowledgeable people - its a pleasure to interact with them… they do have a penchant for frolic. Despite each department competing for safety awards when they’re given out bi-annually. Infrastructure - need i say more? - is fantastic, both the lab setups and pilot plants.

We get awesome breakfast and lunch here… and there’s carrom, TT, badminton to be played in the evenings… gym for those who sign up for it and did i mention they have bollywood dance classes twice a week for ‘enthu junta’ !

How i got here : just applied to the HR manager here, an interview call and voila!

falls at hogenakkal

The weekends :

So basically, i work my ass off, literally, on weekdays so that i can enjoy the weekends like hell — 6 weekends till date and I’ve been to Ooty, Mysore, Pondicherry, Hogenakkal (wonderful place though unheard of) and the common tourist attractions here…

All in all, its been one helluva summer — a hell of a lot of work and even more play makes a summer a GOD one!

So, here I am (still alive)…and as promised, I’m telling you the tale of the helluva trip to Jog Falls. It’s some 380 kms form Bangalore, and these falls are the greatest falls in India. Situated in North-west Karnataka, this place is only 150 kms from Goa. The western coast is just 40 kms from there and there are some amazing beaches located there.

Ok, so Jog falls first. Great place, serenading falls, clear limpid water crashing down with great force on you (only if you happen to be beneath it). The water falls from a height of about 800ft. And as you look up, the sight of the rocks forming a ‘U’ is just enthralling. Although, the photo here is taken from the top of the falls (yeah- you can actually go to the origin of the falls). The time we were there, it hadn’t rained much, so quantity-wise, there wasn’t much water. However, there was enough to have a good bath (and even to get drowned). It takes about an hour to climb down some 1500 steps to reach the falls and one has to climb up and get down a number of big-small rocks in the course.

It’s a great place. Definitely worth visiting at-least once.

Largest waterfalls in India

Om Beach

Awesomemax beach. Extremely scenic, very elegant and beautiful.

Forms an 'Om' and hence the name

As soon as we reached this place, we just threw off our clothes and dived into the water. One can just keep lying down in the waves there for hours…maybe even days…it’s so calm and tranquil…

Certainly had one of the best times of my life on this crazy trip…and both the places are 120% recommended to every living soul on earth.

PS: No specific details of what we did at the two places have been provided to maintain the decorum of this blog. You might get it on my personal blog or the EE spam group.