Hello everyone, my name is Shaan, and I am a EE BTech fourth-year
student. I have been interning at Barclays with the “Delta 1” team
in Global Markets, Mumbai. In this blog, I will be going into my
internship season prep, the selection process, and then I will go
into the internship experience itself. So let’s get started!
Pre-Interview: Preparing for the internship season
Like most third-year students, I was bewildered about what roles I
should apply for. Going into the third year, I had experience in
software engineering and was also interested in finance as I had
been trading for a while then, so I decided to go for both software
and finance! So for preparing for software, I started doing the
standard Leetcode and Interviewbit preparation, and for finance, I
started reading up on various financial terms from Investopedia. For
the resume submission, I created a two-page “tech” resume and a
1-page “tech” as well as a “non-tech” resume. Also, I think that it
is vital that you get your resumes reviewed by your friends and
seniors.
Interview Process
So going into the interview process, I was shortlisted for 3 “Tech”
roles on Day 1, but I messed up in the interviews and could not
convert them; looking back now, I know that I had nearly no
knowledge of DSA :)!
After that, the next shortlist I got was
directly for Barclays (it is not a “Day 1” company but comes pretty
early in the season). Barclays’s shortlist was based on a resume
shortlisting and a test. The test was an MCQ test having some
aptitude questions and some questions testing knowledge of basic
financial concepts and some simple programming concepts.
The
interview process consisted of three rounds. The first round
consisted of the interviewers asking me some questions on basic
financial terms and also some data manipulation questions using
Pandas (I had mentioned this on my resume). The second round
consisted of an interview with a director wherein we discussed what
my internship would be like and what the Delta 1 desk does. The
final round was with the managing director, and it also consisted of
a similar discussion as to what sort of work is done from the Mumbai
office and what kind of work I would get to do.
Internship Experience
My internship was conducted in person, and it was my first “office” experience. My work consisted of making models to predict rebalances in Indices. An index is a basket of stocks, and my work was to predict rebalances, i.e., which stocks would go into the basket and which would get kicked out. Overall, the internship experience was great as I learned a lot of new things and had a lot of fun!
The whole experience, from the prep to the interviews and the internship itself, was enjoyable, and I think I learned a lot. I also believe that it is entirely okay to be totally confused and that contrary to normal “advice,” if you are not sure which profile you want to go for, you should go for them all!
Thanks for reading the blog till the end!
PS Please feel free to contact me if you have any more questions or need some help.