The past few weeks had been a hell of a roller coaster ride. I’m glad that Franklin Templeton Investments offered me this opportunity.
Building dashboards and models
I always wanted to innovate and build my own dashboards and models that can help the company make real-time vital decisions and provide them with useful insights.
I have been building tons of dashboards using Power BI and Tableau by extracting data from Excel, SQL Server and Bloomberg Terminal for different portfolio managers. These dashboards deliver fast insights and help them track the risks and KPIs (key performance indicators) in a portfolio. This enabled me to dig deeper into finance and improve my financial literacy.
Apart from this, I’m on the verge of finishing a project in Python. I’m building a model to detect the probability of one defaulting a loan which is quite fascinating and I’m definitely proud of.
How it feels to succeed at an internship
The feeling you get by building something for the company that can help in driving its performance higher is undeniably priceless. These dashboards enable the portfolio managers to swiftly grasp and measure all the data accurately. It helps them evaluate the volatility and risks in portfolios while maximizing the profits for investors.
Acquiring a theoretical and practical understanding of a subject at the iSchool and then actually implementing it in the real world boosts your confidence and gives you a sense of satisfaction.
Finding a new interest in Business Intelligence
I’d say Business Intelligence and Risk is pretty exciting and a great domain to build your career in. Everything that revolves around it can help companies get some insights and make real-time decisions. I never thought that I would enjoy visualizing data so much.
Secondly, Bloomberg Terminal is completely a different world. I never had an opportunity to use it ever in my life, it astonishes me with the amount of data one can access with it. Every day I learn a new feature of it.
Using an internship to network
Like I mentioned in my previous posts, my first encounter with Bloomberg Terminal was quite intriguing and I absolutely love working on it.
I also realized the importance of networking within the company. This exposes you to different departments and gives you a whole picture of how they function.
My networking helped me get diverse projects in risk, compliance, business intelligence, and project management. My most recent ongoing project is about the testing phase in the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC).
Applying practical skills from the iSchool classroom
IST 652 – Enterprise Risk Management and Business Analytics had been the two most important subjects that laid the foundation of my internship projects. Learning tools like Power BI, MS Excel, Tableau, etc. have really helped me since the very start of my internship.
Also, as I have recently got access to the Oracle database and SQL Server, the concepts I learnt in my Database Management Systems class are helping me run queries successfully for data extraction and with my everyday tasks.
