Another sun-soaked season comes to a close. I was so happy to “break” into finance this year and it’s been a tremendously interesting internship, owing to some unusual circumstances and a fantastic team. I worked at a large commercial bank on the top floor (well, the C-Suite occupies the floor above us) and I’ll be honest - pressing my floor in the elevator still hasn’t gotten old after 10 weeks.
A full-time hire started the same day as me and we were both assigned to the same portfolio. Working with him was a learning opportunity in and of itself; he was incredibly proactive with great interpersonal skills, and served as a good example for how to act as a new hire. We both hit the ground running.
We were on the subprime mortgage and mortgage-backed securities portfolios. Older people will be familiar with how the subprime mortgage crisis caused the 2007-2009 economic recession. Back then, I was still a kid and before this internship, I barely understood what a mortgage was, let alone what happened. A friend recommended The Big Short to me and I found it an entertaining and educational look at how these did the damage they did.
From the get-go, it felt like I was drinking from the firehose.
The learning curve was steep because there was just so much information to swallow in so little time. We needed to pull data from various databases but in order to know what sources to pull it from, we needed to understand what’s in the portfolio and how the assets worked. It wasn’t just a matter of conceptually understanding what a mortgage-backed security was, but understanding it from an accounting perspective and accordingly, how the bank structures its data. I must have read hundreds of pages of documentation and paperwork – if you look in my notebook, you’ll see a ton of flowcharts, graphs, and diagrams.
Every intern also got a mentor. Mine was one of my interviewers and out of three people, he had asked the toughest technical questions – former math professor, go figure. Looking back, I don’t think I could have had a better mentor! Even though he was a busy person, he often gave me lectures on the spot covering topics from mathematical theory to financial news to the bank’s history. Above all, I think what set him apart was how he didn’t just give me guidance, but also opportunities for me to set myself apart.
It was as simple as giving me exposure to different things by bringing me to all of his meetings, whether or not they related to my current work. In and out of these meetings, he would “go to bat” for me with my manager by recommending additional work for me to take on. It was still up to me to deliver results but with his support, I was able to do a lot in 10 weeks. I am pretty grateful and someday, I want to be to somebody else what he was to me.
There is so much more I could say about this summer, but I want to focus on what I think makes for a successful intern based on the last couple months. Like other things in life, being remembered comes down to two things: having information, and using it well.
Information is Power
- Get the information you need. One of the senior quants said this to me over and over in my first week and it internalizes a deeper mentality: being proactive. In his context, it was about understanding how subprime mortgages work and figuring that out by not just reading things, but also talking to the portfolio managers, the traders, and the accounting people.
Being proactive meant asking questions early and asking questions often, going to where the information was instead of waiting for the information to somehow come to you. In a way, this mentality is similar to that of advocating for yourself, which is what every hard-of-hearing and deaf person has had to learn.
Good social skills make getting information easier. At the core, this skill is about being able to develop chemistry with others.
In the short-term, chemistry not only helps you with getting information from others, but also in collaborating with people on projects. When your coworkers feel natural and comfortable interacting with you, communication is smoother, issues can be addressed more quickly, and direction is clearer when everyone is on the same page. When management likes you, they remember your name and serve as good advisors and mentors.
In the long-term, you learn about prevailing trends, issues, and opportunities to “add value.” Chance, indeed, favors the prepared mind.
Be authentic. Frankly, developing social skills isn’t easy; it is a muscle that only improves through consistent practice. I think there is so much advice out there that gives shortcuts and “hacks” on “getting people to like you,” which are often executed at the expense of sincerity. On the other end, people champion authenticity but it’s important to realize that being authentic isn’t something you do for other people. Instead, it means having confidence in yourself and believing that there is value in who you are. It means recognizing that you cannot please everybody and being at peace with that. Plus, you do better work when you feel comfortable in your own skin instead of when you’re trying to be somebody you’re not.
Being Indispensible
Add value. This action can be broken into two components: making yourself indispensible to the company, and making yourself indispensible to other people.
The first component is about improving the company as a whole. Examples include becoming a subject matter expert e.g. on an asset class, or taking initiative on finding ways to improve the bottom line, or taking on a much-needed but ignored issue.
The second component is about making other people’s jobs easier. This can be as straightforward as generating weekly risk reports to your boss exactly the way they like to read it, or as altruistic as helping a busy coworker tackle obstacles in their work, or even serving in an advisory or mentorship capacity to others.
Write good code, or write good papers. Both were a big part of my internship and this seems to be the general trend in the quant space of finance. That leads to the next bullet point…
Learn to focus without distraction on cognitively demanding tasks. You really cannot be a good (quant) intern if you cannot consistently produce work that isn’t easy to reproduce. Focusing on hard things that people unambiguously value, day after day, week after week, is more or less the whole ball game and to do that, you need to learn how to do deep work.