Internship that made me rethink my career...(technology summer analyst at Goldman Sachs) | Tina Huang

0:00So the first day after we all had breakfast and were mingling, this concept of a higher-he'd-be-handed form. How did I end up here? I applied to a lot of software engineering roles in addition to data science roles, because nobody would interview me for data science. This particular role was a software engineering role, and I got in from doing software engineering interviews. So after I got in, you go through this team matching process and your resume gets circulated throughout the company. And managers would reach out to you to ask you about your interests. This was actually an email that I got from the person that ultimately became my manager. So I basically told him that I wanted to do data science, and he was like, oh, okay, sure. We have terabytes of data that's just kind of like sitting there so you can come and try to make something out of it. Sounds good. I want to say that Goldman Sachs was also so convincing. As soon as I received my offer, I had multiple people call me ranging from junior to mid-seater level. They talked about their work, and when I mentioned that I also had an Amazon offer, they were super nice and talked about all the things I could expect if I came to Goldman Sachs instead.

1:04And they also asked if they could introduce me to any formal interns where pretty much like anybody I wanted to talk to about their experience. Compared to my Amazon offer, we're at Amazon. Literally nobody even responded to me. So clearly, when you compare those two, Goldman Sachs stood out like a star. Okay, so orientation. The internship class of 2019 was huge, and there were around 2000 interns just in North America. The headquarters was two buildings, one in New York and one in New Jersey. And it's across this river from each other, and you take a 10 minute ferry ride across. There were actually a lot of days where I was bearing back and forth between the two buildings. So my internship was in the Newark office, but there were people from all over the States, and they flew everybody into New York, sash, New Jersey to attend orientation. I actually dug up the orientation schedule to show you guys. We were in this huge auditorium. I wish I still had the photos that I took, but just imagine we had this name tag and the division we worked at in our roles, which for me was security's division as a technology summer analyst. It was absolutely breathtaking and I was just so excited to be there.

2:09There were rows and rows of business casual people and fancy food on the sides. We also had these senior people walk up to the internship and talk about the work they did, and all the exciting new ventures like Goldman Sachs was leading. I remember feeling just incredibly excited and lucky to be there. Now with that being said though, looking back now, I also remember having a pretty vivid memory that turned out to be some high quality foreshadowing. So the first day after we all had breakfast and were mingling, this concept of a higher heat-becanza form. I've never done anything in finance before, so I had no idea about this. But after going through these initial conversations, I learned that people in sales and trading and investment banking had their own orientations, which were quote-unquote far fancier and got the more fancy presenters and more fancy activities. I remember thinking, okay, well, I don't really mind since I'm just here to enjoy my internship and I still can't believe that I'm even here. So as orientation continued on, and I went to the engineering trainings. By the way, I completely forgot what community

3:12was. But it was in these engineering trainings in the securities overview, this higher key concept kind of showed up again. The interns of the securities division were split into two major groups of people. There are these strats and there are the engineers. For those of you that don't know, strats are people who are the ones like modeling risk, writing algorithms and analyzing data. They are also the ones that sat the closest to the trading tables. And as I later learned, apparently, the closer you are to the trading table, the more prestigious it is. So I guess like the most prestigious would be the trading people and then it would be the strats. I was doing data science, which kind of sounds more like a strap roll, but I was technically part of the engineering group since I interviewed as an engineer. But anyways, these two groups of people began to form because it was plain as they that the strats got more trainings, got more prestigious people's hotend to them, and were invited to attend more events like dinners and talks. So at this point, I was like getting these bad vibes, you know? Like if you've ever been in a situation where there's clearly a hierarchy, it kind of feels shitty being at a bottom because you can just,

4:16you know, sense that. And honestly, I feel like even if you're higher up, the vibe is probably just always like climb higher. And even if you're at the top, it's always about prestige. You get what I mean. But whatever, I told myself to just brush it off. And again, I'm here to learn and to enjoy my internship. So now it was time to hit the desk. After orientation, we all hit the desk on June 5th. I was super excited because I chatted with my manager on their phone and I really enjoyed talking to him. I was also assigned a buddy who was one of the more junior people on the team. Let's call my manager games and we can call my buddy Steve. So I met James and Steven and they introduced me to the rest of the team and my workstation. By the way, the floors are set up in like these long rows. It's basically this open workspace with long rows of computers. And then you also have these side offices for empties where like the marketing directors, the more senior people. So Steven kind of showed me around and later in the day, I had a meeting with James to talk about my project and timelines. My overarching project was to create a model that could detect and predict anomalies in the bank's liquidity. Liquidity is cash that the banks have to maintain at all times following the

5:20await financial cash. The liquidity is always changing as traders, book trades and new projects are being funded and different sources of revenue is are flowing in. The whole idea is that if there's too much liquidity, we're just cash sitting there. The bank is losing money because they could be investing it in something that makes them more money. And if there's too little liquidity, that would be very bad because by law, they need to maintain the certain amount of liquidity. At that time, the liquidity was managing a very manual way and a portion of team's work was essentially to frantically call different divisions or different teams whenever the liquidity dipped or spiked just to try to figure out where it was coming from so they can report it to upper management. My job was to create a model that could detect these anomalies and pinpoint them to the source and even better if I could predict when these spikes and tips would happen. So before I did that, I needed to actually get the data. And that is to be done with Scala, a Java based programming language for Apache Spark. I won't get into too much technical detail here, but I basically had to get the data using this native Scala language. I didn't know any Scala, so I spent about a week

6:24purely learning it. And then the next like three to four weeks, I would say, creating the functions to retrieve the data and wrangle it appropriately. During this first month and a half or so, I also attended talks and had these coffee chats with lots of people around the company. And this is when you go for a walk for 30 minutes or so and you can ask them about their work. Woman's Sacks, where G.S. is everybody called it is a huge company with a really complex internal structure. So it was really interesting talking to all these people and trying to understand what people do. Most people responded to my messages and were really nice and talked to me about the company and their work and pretty much any other questions that I had. I really enjoyed these meetings and learning about finance since I didn't have any finance background. I also really enjoyed working with my team and became good friends with a couple of the people that sat close to me and a few strats that were at the orientation. We would always grab coffee together at the cafe that was also in the building. So overall I was really enjoying a learning and I had made friends. But once in a while I would hear about these like exclusive events and dinners with MDs for strats and even more so for sales

7:28and training people and investment banking. And I'm not going to lie, little by little it did kind of bother me. My friends obviously never rubbed it in or anything but sometimes they and other people that I would occasionally talk to which is be talking about all these cool things that they got to do and how their MDs would take them out all the time and give them advice you know, etc. It feels bad man. I also learned that a lot of people in engineering tried to eventually come back as a strat or whatever. Of course some don't but I assume it's the people that care about prestige that do. Again, not gonna lie. Back then I cared a lot more about prestige because I think I was a lot more insecure about my abilities and didn't really know what to do with my life. So prestige was a way to prove to myself and others that I was doing well. But in this case, instead of me wanting to you know become a strat and try to network myself into these events and things, it was actually kind of off putting for me because I didn't want to work in environment where it's just always about more prestige. I got the sense that people really cared more about the prestige than what they were even working on. So yeah, that's kind of what's all going on

8:32on the side. But back to the actual work. About halfway into the internship, I had the data retrieved and rang it. I then started to work on making that model to detect liquidity and non-place. It had to be an unsupervised model since we didn't have labels for the data. Luckily though, there was this more senior vice president, RvP, let's call him Frank. He was on a team and he was very knowledgeable and was also super helpful. So even though I was doing an unsupervised model, whenever I saw spikes, redifts in the data, he kind of acted like a human anomaly detector labeler person and told me what he knew happened on those days. So in this way, I could roughly tune the model based on the events that Frank told me had happened and try to remove the noise of the day to day. I did lots of different data transformations, including taking into account seasonality in a data, and I also used a bunch of different unsupervised models. I eventually settled on a hybrid that was based on isolation forest. Sounds fancy, right? But I want to make a note. Before this internship, I hadn't really touched and model for it, so I had lots of lots of help from mostly my buddy Steven. He had a data science master's degree and worked as a data scientist

9:35for several years before. Steven is really one of the most awesome people and is incredibly intelligent, yet also really kind and helped me out so much, even though he had so many things to do himself as well. He really guided me through this project. James, my manager, had less data science experience, but was also incredibly kind and helpful, and he always made time for me when I asked for it, and he just generally had my best interests that hard. So now we're nearing the end of the internship. I presented my work to the team and the adjacent teams. After I also presented to the MD of my division over a call. This was also the first time I actually talked to my MD, but he liked my work, and told me to write an executive summary, which I did. So why did I not come back? I had a lot of mixed feelings, but I was absolutely certain that I wasn't going to come back. It's funny, right? The most the more strategic thing for me is to try my best to get a return offer. So I have a safety net, in case I don't land a full-time job, but I was like, nope, I refuse. And I actually told my

10:36manager that I didn't want to come back. Okay, so let me actually get into why I didn't want to come back and how it dramatically fundamentally changed my career path so much so that I decided I'm applying and interviewing for management consulting roles for full-time. Number one, I cannot stand the hierarchy and the obsession with prestige and titles. It was just so off-putting to me, and I had no intention of spending the majority of my time worrying about those things and networking myself into higher circles instead of focusing on doing the work that I enjoy. I realized that management consulting is very much about this as well, but I thought I could handle it better if I enjoyed the work I was doing, which leads to my second point. Number two, my work was very intellectually stimulating, and I spent most of my days thinking about the model and coding with very few interactions with people. So by the first month, I was really craving human interaction, and that's why I would go for a coffee with a friend every single day. Now, it also goes to a bunch of talks just to get my fix. What I realized doing the type of work I was doing is that I really thrive on teamwork, and two of my biggest strengths are communication and like big picture business

11:41idea, generation and strategy, and these two things I had closely zeroed. And three, I became great friends with several people on my team, and the more I chatted with them, the more my personality and passions and I guess like aspirations came through. They were actually the ones that were gently suggested to me that this company and this role is probably really not suitable for me, not because I couldn't do the work, but because it just wasn't the type of work that I enjoyed doing. They were also the ones that gave me the idea of management consulting. Overall, I can say that this was a pivotal internship where I learned so much about myself. I realized I really liked the people on my team, and I actually still keep in touch with them, especially my buddy and the friends that I made. But it also made me realize the things that mattered to me and it helped me find direction in my career path. I think this experience also shows my personality a lot. In retrospect, it was definitely the smart thing to do to play it safe and not just tell people that I wasn't going to come back. Since afterwards, I actually failed all the one consulting interview before desperately

12:41applying to more business aligned data science positions and where I got my current job offered. I very well could have ended up with nothing. Luckily, my story did have a happy ending, but still do as I say, not as I do. Well, I hope you guys enjoyed the story of my Goldman Sachs internship experience and found it, I don't know, helpful, insightful. Well, thanks for watching and see you guys in the next video.