Technical internships are important, know why.

Is it your dream to work in some of the biggest tech giants like Google, Amazon, and Meta?

The best way for you to realize whether the tech industry is the most suited career option is by going for an internship. Internships are extremely important to the career of a student. They give you the right amount of exposure needed to understand if you want to go down this career path. They give you the platform where you can work on real-world problems and get a flavor of the type of work and the culture that you will encounter in the coming years.

Mostly, interns are not differentiated from the full-time employees and rather work on the most confidential and intricate projects that are either commencing or have been instated for a while. Let's move on to hear from the interns themselves and finding out what is the one thing that helped them excel –

The Analyst Intern - American Express

"The internship at AMEX exposed me to the multiple facades of data crunching and management. Certain tools were new for me, but eventually, they came along really well with, the guidance of the mentors. This experience ignited a spark in me and helped me realize my true affiliation for technological innovation space as my forte."

American Express is one of the largest players in the financial services domain. From issuing credit cards to processing payments and providing travel-related services worldwide, the firm is one of the best out there in business. AMEX hires diverse interns across India, who have the option to work on some of their most lucrative live projects, helping them create impact in the long term.

An incoming fourth-year undergraduate from IIT Delhi interned at AMEX and shared his journey with us. After bagging an internship at AMEX, all the interns were given certain perks along with MacBook laptops to refrain from having or sharing any proprietary and confidential information at a personal level. "The internship is eight weeks long, the initial two were devoted to understanding the dynamics and theory behind their work culture and ongoing projects. The intern was based out of the big data team, guided by very approachable mentors and directors.

Introduction - AMEX being home to silos of financial data has an enormous amount of responsibility to manage and take care of it. Naturally, all the data was not stored at the same place but rather stored in 3 different clusters with different technologies. The data is not divided randomly, but in terms of market, region, and many more factors.

Work - The most fascinating aspect about these clusters is to be synced up at all times. This means that if data is added to a particular cluster, the other clusters sync up automatically to incorporate the new data. It was observed that these clusters were inefficient and full of inconsistencies.

Managing data is a big challenge in today's world. Roughly, 30–40% of the data was redundant which required cleansing leading to the optimization of the data packets. Thus, certain database technological tools like MySQL, Spark Python, Apache Hive, and Apache NiFi were used from the Apache software. These tools are extremely useful for interactively analyzing data in a distributed environment. The open-source data warehouse software helps in reading, writing and managing large data set files that are stored under Apache Hadoop Distributed File System or other data storage systems."

The Analyst Intern - Goldman Sachs

"Goldman Sachs introduced me to the world of finance. It was amazing to witness this extensive application of programming in financial models. A couple of months just swayed away in a wink as the work was so engrossing which helped me keep motivated to grasp and learn new things along the way."

Goldman Sachs is a leading global financial institution that delivers a broad range of financial services across various facets of investment banking, securities, consumer banking, and many more to a large and diversified client base that includes private and government-based institutions and individuals. The firm hires high-quality analytical-based interns from the top engineering institutions in the country. The following is the internship experience of an incoming fourth-year undergraduate from IIT Delhi who interned in the securities division of Goldman Sachs.

"Initially, the onboarding team ensured that the access and resources were easily available. The mentor and manager were very wholesome and guided at every step of the intern and introduced the project details for familiarity. It was the beginning of a steep learning curve that demanded long intense and hard-working hours.

Introduction - The project revolved around reducing the time taken in swap pricing and valuation. A swap is essentially a promise to undertake a transaction at a set price or rate at several dates in the future. The technique behind this is to price and value swaps to identify and construct a portfolio with cash flows equivalent to those of the swap.

Work - Moreover, the project involved optimization of memory consumption to build interest rate yield curves. A yield curve is a line that plots yields (interest rates) of bonds having equal credit quality but differing maturity dates. The slope of the yield curve gives an idea of future interest rate changes and economic activity which signifies its importance. This involved a lot of intricate learning on the flow. Ultimately, it came down to caching of values to allow sharing among all derivatives. Removing the intermediate pass-through function calls in forwarding rates computation for swaps helped further reduce the time taken in swap pricing and evaluation. Certain mathematical models and algorithms like Monte Carlo Pricing in python were used in the case of financial derivatives. Moreover, the yield curve is built, plotted, and analyzed using certain toolkits from MATLAB and Simulink. Truly, the involvement of mathematics and programming in the financial world is just inevitable."

The Quantitative Trader Intern - Quadeye

"Working at Quadeye made me realize my affiliation to work in a fast-paced environment. There was never any monotony in the work as every day possessed new challenges that were extremely interesting to crack and do good for the firm."

Quadeye is a trading firm that specializes in quantitative proprietary trading. The firm has a presence in multiple markets across global exchanges. One of the core competencies of this firm is its liquidity provision which plays a vital role in maintaining the overall efficiency and health of the global financial markets even during times of market turbulence.

Founded by IIT Delhi alumni, this high-frequency trading firm is renowned for hiring top-notch interns having an acumen for numbers and algorithms. The following is the experience of a third-year computer science undergraduate who interned at Quadeye to understand the dynamics of this industry. "Introduction - The work revolving around these firms is not that ordinary. It's something very different and exciting as one always needs to be on their toes. Everything has to be implemented as swiftly as possible for the maximum business potential outcome. Trading firms operate using highly optimized codes with very low latency.

The project constituted feature addition and integration in one of the modules in the firm's base code. Features are added regularly to extract the best out of the programs. Mostly, the coding part was done in C++, clang tools were used to provide high developer-oriented functionality. Linux scripting and CMake were also used for the execution of shell commands and to generate native build tool files specific to the compiler platform respectively. The work was very crisp and to the point which was further assisted by the project mentor for us getting along new variables easily."

The Software Developer Intern - Oracle

"The best part of the internship for me was to contribute to a live project that was later deployed in the Oracle cloud services. Moreover, it was a very research-based environment that paved for further exploration and new learnings in this industry. It was not just blatant coding, but rather the understanding of features and their integration for max impact"

Oracle is a cloud-based technology company that provides organizations with computing infrastructure and software to help them innovate, unlock efficiencies and become more effective. Moreover, Oracle created the world's first and only autonomous database to help organize and secure customer data. The firm encourages personal and professional growth and hires passionate young interns for developing innovative technologies that help people and companies tackle real-world problems. The following is an internship experience of a third-year undergraduate student from IIT Delhi.

Introduction - There is a multitude of divisions at the firm and cloud infrastructure is the sole basis of everything. Being assigned to the big data and AI team, the project mostly revolved around initiating a new cloud service on the lines of the programming jobs i.e. the piece of programming used for execution.

The crux of the project was to build an app profiler, a tool for analyzing a chunk of task jobs to predict the accurate parameters of the user. These jobs are highly configurable and minute variations in the parameters could lead to the failure or consumption of extra time. At the end of the day, the entire project data was imported to a new version of spark where parameters were attributed and algorithms were curated for the tool. Certain Scala and Java tools were used hand in hand. Spark and Hadoop were used as big data tools, whereas Unix was used to access cloud servers.

The ONE thing common to all the above experiences is to be always open to progressive learning. In the tech industry, the most important facet is to adapt and keep yourself updated with the latest technology trends. Otherwise, you may become outdated in a span of 4- 5 years. The never-giving-up attitude and welcoming of novel concepts in a wholesome manner lead to a cherishable internship experience that goes a long way.

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