Internships Pave the Golden Opportunities
Two College of Business fresh graduates (Class of 2023), Lindsey Chen and Andreas, were offered jobs by HSBC after the internship opportunities at the bank during their studies at the College of Business. Lindsey Chen is now an Incoming Graduate Analyst in HSBC Global Markets while Andreas on the Graduate Programme of HSBC Private Banking.
Motivated by her interests in computer science, maths and finance, Lindsey Chen decided to pursue her undergraduate studies in Computational Finance at CityU. She strived to gradually build up the skills needed to pursue a career in the field as she is passionate about the sales and trading business of an investment bank. Prior to her graduation this summer, she interned with several sell-side firms and gained industry exposure to foreign exchange (FX) and equity derivatives in both trading and structuring roles. HSBC Global Markets offered her a post early this year.
Andreas is an international student from Indonesia receiving a full tuition scholarship from CityU to study Bachelor of Science in Computational Finance and Financial Technology. Last summer, he had the opportunity to intern at HSBC in Hong Kong as a Global Private Banking Summer Analyst and was given a return offer.
The College congratulates to their achievements and wishes them a bright future. Meanwhile, let’s read their stories on why they joined the College’s degree programme, their learning and lives at CityU as well as their internship experience.
Actively Apply What You Enjoyed Learning
Lindsey Chen Meiling
BSc in Computational Finance ‘2023
It is just one day ahead of my commencement ceremony. There are two major thoughts in mind. I am very thrilled about joining HSBC in Global Markets and moving into the next stage of life, and that wouldn’t be possible without the support and endless encouragement provided by all those who have lied my spirits and stood by me during difficult times. Another thing I am pondering over is how I could use one line to summarize my college years that would have the end connected with the start of the journey. It would be the cliché that everyone just hears way too often – follow through what you love doing, but here I would make a tweak: actively apply what you enjoyed learning.
Career aspiration
During the first year of studies, I spent a lot of time “making contributions” to the retail phenomenon as I invested myself in trading stocks not just because it was fun but because I could draw the connections between what I learnt in school and the real world, despite things in classes and books often being a simplified model of the real-world. I spent a lot of time researching stock fundamentals and leveraged what I learnt from basic finance courses to run classic stock valuations in spreadsheets as well as to read a great amount of company statements and earnings calls. I filled the gaps in the day with news-reading, such as during the commute to school or while queuing for my lunch, to learn from across a wide range of topics.
In the meanwhile, throughout the first two years, from joining a number of career talks organized by the College and the major, and also from participation in several networking programs run by leading firms in the field, I became aware of various career possibilities that would offer the same situational narrative in alignment with my interests. At its core, it stays close to the market with constant use of qualitative and quantitative analysis to drive trading decisions. This was how I once identified the characteristics of my career but of course, there is way more than what these few words could summarize about trading.
Internships connect theories and practice
A few internships on the sell-side following the first two years of studies, each providing me with a different perspective of the market. From the warrant desk at Vontobel, I had the first ideas of short gamma risk and how porolio risk management works in real-time and in volatile environments. I had the chance to undertake projects taking intra-day data to analyze trading slippage through the application of classification features and also taking broad market data to make product recommendation. From the first rotation in the EM FX (emerging market foreign currency) trading desk at JPMorgan, I learnt about the linear derivative markets in FX, how these contracts are used by corporates which itself constitutes a useful factor and how traders need to quickly analyze both hard and so information to make prices. From my second rotation with the equity structuring desk, I was introduced to OTC (over-the-counter) exotics for the first time, the risk analysis of which involved a multitude of factors such as the cross-asset correlations among stocks, interest rates, and foreign currencies, and the volatile behavior of risks around different levels, adding complexities to both pricing and hedging. The industry knowledge I gained from these earlier internships were incredibly useful again in helping me find the connection between theories and practice in the later half of my studies, such as in modules that talked about time series modelling of volatilities, exotics derivative pricing models or macroeconomic concepts like interest rate parity. I could apply, in the other sense, what I learnt from work on school projects, making the school experience all the more fun.
Near the end of my studies, I decided to take on another full-time internship with the investment bank BBVA in their equity derivatives trading desk. My supervisor and colleagues encouraged me to work on my final-year project on the side and the whole team was extremely supportive and generous in offering their expertise and insights. I learnt a great deal of concepts about volatility dispersion and ran a study that showed how we could make use of readily available data accessible to students as well to generate a simplified back-test of the strategy applied on HSCEI Index. Despite the fact that sometimes I did feel a bit overtaxed alongside studies, myriads of interviews and assessments while searching for my grad job, I felt way more often grateful for having so many good people around who said we could work out a solution together and who told me why I should be confident in myself.
From Jakarta to CityU to HSBC Private Bank
Andreas
BSc Computational Finance and Financial Technology ‘2023
*Andreas (right) on MBSC Case Competition Team
Technology on the rise
I was born and raised in Jakarta, Indonesia, and was interested in economics and finance due to my father's influence. That is the reason I choose Hong Kong as my country of choice for my Bachelor’s degree, as Hong Kong has been known as the Asian financial hub, and I believe that it would be good for me to learn more about the spaces in one of the important financial hub in the world.
I chose CityU mostly because CityU is a very international institution and very generous in their scholarship offer directed at International students, and I chose Computational Finance and Financial Technology major specifically because I realized that technology companies are on the rise, especially in my home country, Indonesia where there is a lot of fintech companies changing the landscape. I believe by choosing my major, I could be exposed to the coding skills required to stay relevant in the job market in the future while learning about the finance sector, in which I am very interested.
Andreas (second left) and his team members won at HSBC/HKU Hong Kong Business Case Competition in 2023
Life in CityU
Through my learning times in CityU, the major and stream I chose have helped me hone my fundamental finance skills while drilling my computational skills. I believe the BSc Computational Finance programme at CityU is doing a very good job of preparing the students to be quant finance analysts, as some of the courses tailored for this major really help the student understand the math and theory behind pricing complex asset classes.
Even though this is not the path that I chose to follow in the end for my career, I believe that being in this major helped me hone my market knowledge immensely, and this, on its own, I believe, has helped differentiate me during an interview process compared to other candidates. Other than that, the College of Business also helped me a lot during my time in university by allowing me to represent CityU at some of the prestigious case competition events that helped me hone my problem-solving and presentation skills. Some of these competitions include the McDonough Business Strategy Challenge (MBSC) that I joined in 2022, where the CityU Team finished in the top-8 position, and the HSBC/HKU Hong Kong Business Case Competition, in which the CityU Team emerged as a champion and will continue to represent Hong Kong in the Asia Pacific Round.
Experience in HSBC Private Bank
During my time in the Global Private Bank division of HSBC in Hong Kong, I was placed in the Wealth Planning and Advisory division of the firm that helps the client of Private Bank to deal with their succession and business continuation matters. When I first started my internship, it shocked me because the division I worked in mostly dealt with legal and tax code matters and had almost no correlation with the coursework I had done throughout my university life.
However, the extensive range of courses that CFin has as a major equipped me with the skills to adapt my learning style and helped me better absorb information from the new field. This, combined with the help and guidance that my colleague and HSBC as an organization provided, helped me start understanding my division's role and contributing more to the team.
Some of the tasks I have done during the internship mainly revolve around researching the clients' needs, including property tax in foreign countries, inheritance law on alternative asset classes, and other vast arrays of topics surrounding succession and inheritance.
The internship program offered by HSBC has a very intuitive and clear program structure. Each intern will have three big checkpoints during their internship that will help determine whether they will receive a return offer. These 3 checkpoints include a mid-internship review, a final internship review, and a final presentation.
The mid-internship review happens around 4-5 weeks into the internship, where you will have a one-on-one review with your direct manager to talk more about what you have done in the internship so far. In the end, the manager will give some feedback on things that can be improved during the rest of the internship. From my personal experience, I didn’t receive a very good performance rating during this mid-internship review due to my unfamiliarity with the division and other factors, but my manager gave me a lot of good and actionable feedback that I could work on during the rest of my internship.
The end of internship review as the name suggest happens around week 8-9 of your internship with the same format of the mid-internship review. In this last meeting, usually, your manager will check on some items that he/she suggested you to work on during the mid-internship review and see whether you make some improvement.
Lastly, the final presentation was given during week 8 of the internship. During my time, the HR will randomize the intern class and pair 2 interns into one team to solve one topic related to the Private Bank business. All of the teams were given the same topic and needed to present to a board of judges that mainly consisted of the direct manager of every intern in the class and some of the senior management of HSBC Private Bank. After all this process and 2-3 weeks of waiting time, the line manager will schedule a call to the intern to inform them whether or not they received the return offer from the bank to come back as graduate analysts.
All in all, I would say my experience in HSBC has been really fruitful, and I can’t thank CityU enough for helping me with the resources they have to prepare me for the working experience I had in HSBC.
Andreas at HSBC Global Private Banking Summer Internship in 2022
I think my experience in CityU as a whole has helped me broaden my perspective of the world by meeting and exchanging thoughts with other CityU students from different backgrounds and cultures. It has been the most fruitful 4-year experience that I had in my life where I obtained many new friends from all over the world.
If I would give any advice to any university student currently pursuing a degree in CityU, is to try to pursue a balance in every aspect of their university life. I think, especially in Hong Kong, it is very easy to lose balance and simply prioritize studying and focusing on finding good jobs and careers over other aspects of university life. While it is not necessarily bad to primarily focus on those things, I believe it is also equally necessary to enjoy your uni life, make new connections, and explore new places, as these kinds of activities will help bring more enjoyment and fulfillment to your overall university life experience.