My name is Andrey Smirdin, I am a 4th year student at the National Research University Higher School of Economics - St. Petersburg. I have always been interested in economics and loved to follow the financial news. When it came time to look for another summer internship, I decided to try to get into one of the companies that earn money by trading on the stock exchange. Luck smiled at me: I spent 10 weeks in the London office of the trading company Jump Trading. In this post, I want to tell you what I did during the internship and why I decided to try myself in finance again, but as a trader.
(Photo from the company page on )
About Me
In the third year, Applied Mathematics and Informatics students usually choose one of three areas: Machine Learning, Software Engineering, or Programming Languages. I could not decide on the direction that I want to study, therefore, as elective courses, I attended both subjects related to Software Engineering and those related to Machine Learning.
After the second year, I went to Moscow for an internship at Yandex, and after the third year, I set myself the goal of going abroad for an internship.
Finding an internship
Given my interest in finance, I applied not only to giant firms (where everyone wants to go), but also paid increased attention to traders. Since the very beginning of September, I have been browsing lists of companies in aggregator tables like and sent an application if the company was interesting to me. In addition, I browsed for new job openings on LinkedIn, filtering them based on the locations I was interested in.
The result was not long in coming: my first invitation for an interview was from Jump Trading, to which I sent an application through LinkedIn, without knowing anything about what kind of company it was. To my surprise, there was very little information about her on the Internet, which alarmed me quite a lot. However, I learned that Jump Trading has been around for 20 years and that it has offices in all of the world's financial centers. This reassured me, I concluded that the company is serious.
I went through the interviews easily. First there was a short telephone interview with questions about the basics of networking and C++. Then there were three video interviews with more interesting questions. It seemed that the interviewers were trying to test how good I was as a programmer, and not how good I was at thinking, as many other companies do.
As a result, in mid-November, I received my first offer! In parallel, I interviewed in five other companies. For various reasons, in case of success, before the offer, they had to wait another week to a month, but Jump did not want to wait. I decided that I would have the opportunity to gain experience that my friends do not have, and I accepted an offer to London. Subsequently, I also received an offer from Facebook and an invitation to a host match from Google (which almost means an offer).
Expectations and Reality
Before the internship, I had fears that I would have to work non-stop from 8 to 17 (such work hours were in my contract); that there will be no lunches in the office and I will have to go somewhere and eat either very expensive or tasteless; that there will be very few interns and I will have no one to communicate with; and that there will be no interesting activities for the interns. As a result, of all this, only the working day turned out to be true, it really began at 8 in the morning. But, as I found out, this is a normal practice for trading companies and this is due to the time of the exchange. The office had free delicious lunches. There were 20 other interns besides me, and on the first day we were given a calendar with events planned for the duration of our internship. I ended up going karting, having dinner with one of the company's founders, taking a boat ride on the Thames, going to the Science Museum, playing some kind of CHG, and in the first week I played a game that most closely resembled Running City.
Another important feature of financial firms is the location of their offices. If you go to London, then with a high degree of probability you will be lucky enough to work in the City of London - the business center of London and all of Europe. The Jump Trading office is located in the heart of the city, and one of the buildings you know well from English textbooks can be seen from the windows. In my case, that building was St. Paul's Cathedral.
(view from office windows)
In addition to the salary, the company provided housing within walking distance from the office. This is very cool, because housing in the center of London is very expensive.
Tasks for the internship
All interns in the company can be divided into developers and traders. In fact, the former serve the latter, that is, they make it as convenient as possible for them to implement trading strategies. I was one of the developers.
I ended up on a team that was responsible for transferring all information between Jump and various exchanges. During my internship, I had one big project, which was to test the connection with the exchanges: I had to check that everything worked correctly in non-standard situations, for example, if the exchange duplicated some message several times. We met every week with my direct manager and discussed all non-urgent technical issues. I also had weekly meetings with the head of the team, where they discussed more about my impressions of the internship. As a result, I completed my project even a little earlier than planned, gained invaluable experience in writing combat code in C ++, and also understood much more about network protocols (it was not for nothing that I was asked this at an interview, it really came in handy).
(Photo from the company page on )
What's next?
Despite the interesting tasks, during the internship I realized that I would like to try myself as a trader, and not just a developer. I spoke about this during a discussion of my adaptation in the company. It was not good to abandon a project that had already been started, so I was offered to come for another internship, but in a different role.
It turned out that for this it was necessary to go through the interview process again, because traders are tested for completely different skills. However, I was told that they would only check how well I knew mathematics, since my programming skills had already been well appreciated by everyone over the summer. Mathematical interviews were a little more difficult for me than programmer ones, but I did an excellent job with them and next summer I will try something completely new for myself.
Source: habr.com