Saloni Mittal is a fourth year undergraduate majoring in Economics here at IIT Kanpur. She interned at Credit Suisse, Mumbai during the summers of 2015. Read on as she recollects her internship experience at CS.
My internship was at Credit Suisse, which is a bulge bracket bank, that is, one of the top investment banks globally. It offers two internship profiles; ‘Prime Services’ which is the investment banking division and ‘Private Banking Americas’. I interned in the Prime services division.
The Interns Recruitment Procedure
The intern recruitment procedure in the college started after the mid semester exams. After a resume shortlisting, the selected candidates were interviewed by three panels. First two were technical rounds while the last one tested on general awareness and communication skills, more so on confidence. Questions in the first two rounds were based on the previous interns and projects and included some puzzles and HR questions in between. So it is essential to prepare for HR questions and Puzzles from various sources such as Briangle, and be up to date with the current financial affairs such as Grexit, 2008 Global Financial crisis, Devaluation of Chinese currency etc. Apart from all this, self-confidence is an essential skill add-on to crack any interview.
By the way, make sure you’re pronouncing the name of the company right 😛
Work Experience
Internships are a great means to know a firm and also decide if you fit in the work culture that the firm provides. You continually test yourself in the corporate milieu, to decide if your skill set matches the requirements of the firm and whether the firm is conducive to an overall personality development and learning. Credit Suisse, in this regard, surpasses its adversaries.
Credit Suisse Office – Mumbai
During the internship the learning curve rallied up exponentially. There are two primary reasons for this,
1. The focus of the internship is not on the desk work but on projects. You are assigned projects across all spectrums and you are sometimes free to choose your projects. The target is to complete at least one project with all the seven teams across the Prime Services floor and learn as much as you can in the time of your stay. Overall, you will end up contributing to projects that have a significant impact on the firm’s business, while building your own expertise.
2. The floor was flat. This means that all the teams in the Prime Services shared same space without partitions and there was no hierarchical discrimination in terms of seating arrangement. This made knowledge sharing among teams faster and made senior managers easily available. The team heads were prompt in replying to the queries and patiently answered even the silliest of doubts.
There were seven projects assigned during the internship tenure which were based on Dividend forecasting, Client tiering Model development, Trend analysis for Rights Issue in Europe, VaR modeling in R etc. The best part was that we had no clue about all this when we started working on these projects but learnt about them as the project proceeded.
Benefits of being on a young floor are numerous. We had a lot of team dinners where we got to interact with the seniors in an informal setting. This was the first time most of us got acquainted to Thai and Spanish cuisines, ordering anything and everything we thought would be good. Donuts and pizzas treat was a regular affair and you could throw up anytime working late and asking seniors for “compensations”. There was a philanthropy event organized for the interns where we interacted with kids, played games and set up a science experiment where they could actively participate. This event culminated in everybody dancing on Gangnam style and lunch and snacks for all the participants, and organisers.
Corporate experience helps in developing practical perspective rather than looking at things from an ivory tower and Credit Suisse intern scores full points in providing ample opportunities to gain practical experience.
