Can You help me choose between those two ?

[didje]

Hi everyone !

I have a problem choosing between two great opportunities I just had yesterday and I would like to have your advices on which one I should choose and why.

The context
I am at the end of my Masters degree in Financial Engineering and I need to complete an internship. I want to work in algorithmic trading in the future.

The opportunities
1/ Internship for a brokerage firm in Algo Trading. As an intern I will first develop a tool to analyze the algorithms and their impact on the market and hopefully work on some algorithms myself in the future. The company is willing to recruit if the internship is successful.

• My Pros : I want to do algo trading in the future so... this internship sounds perfect....
• My Cons : But Problem is location (dont see myself in Switzerland yet...), reputation of the firm, and let's be honest intern salary... I know I may be too demanding but... aaah !!

2/ Off-Cycle internship for GS in Structuring (mainly Equities but also Cross-Asset). I initially went to the interviews with little confidence in my capacity to get the internship but I did it (12 interviews in the second-round !!)

• My Pros : This is GS. And it is an off-cycle so 6 months so I should be able to learn a lot from the people there in a lot of different areas (marketing, sales, trading,...). I know I'll be able to leverage on that later. And salary and location is better for me (I am talking London). And well.. It's GS !!!!!
• My Cons : I am not sure that I can use that internship for algotrading jobs in the future. I understood that Hedge Funds or algotrading companies like people with some proven experience in the field so.. that makes me nervous too

Well... I'm a little bit stuck so please.. feel free to tell me what you think about it please ? I

Thank you very much for your help !

 

[didje]

Hi everyone !

No one answered me at the time but I still wanted to add my input after my experience! Maybe it will help people with the same "rich problem" as I had!

I finally chose GS because of the brand name (mostly). En at the end and regretted it ! Multiple reasons for it :

• Internship was a lot different from what I expected (not really Structuring but more Origination so writing term-sheets, legal documents, setting products in Bloomberg and external websites...).
• No valuable exposure to pricing models. Like not at all. Regarding CS skills, I used a lot of SQL and VBA only.

Some of my friends thought I should have accepted the offer they gave me at the end. Now I will work for another bank in Algotrading (for another internship) with a smaller brand name and I feel like this was the best decision.
I realized that getting experience in your field of choice is much more important than the brand name at the beginning. Of course if you can add a big name to your resume from the start it's perfect. But if it means not learning stuff that would be really valuable for the field you aim for... then pass it.

Just wanted to give my feedback to the QuantNet community!

Feel free to add any comment!

 

[C S]

Glad you learned the lesson. I remember seeing your post and thinking the same thing, but I knew from what you wrote you weren't in the state of mind to take that kind of advice. You were clearly enamoured with GS.

 

[didje]

Haha @C S to be honest with you, first thing I thought when I had the GS offer was : "I don't want it. I will refuse it". Then I spent too much time thinking about it. Now I'm on another journey in algorithmic market making and I will do whatever it takes to make it a success.

 

[Andy Nguyen]

Don't be slave for brand names. We see this happens too often on QuantNet where students pick the more famous universities over the lesser known but better quality.
Pick one where you will learn and grow the most. Many people just pretend that big names will automatically do all the hard work for them.

 

[Andy Nguyen]

@didje Maybe you can contribute a "day in the life of GS Structuring analyst" for our audience similar to those before you
https://www.quantnet.com/tags/a+day+in+the+life/