Internship advice

[Jacek Podlewski]

Hi everyone. I'm a Polish MSc student (more about my education here: http://www.quantnet.com/forum/threads/new-quantnet-members-say-hi.1191/page-50#post-74624) thinking of finding a summer internship in quant finance abroad, as hardly any interesting opportunities in this field can be found in Poland. I've already read some of the discussions and blog entries on Quantnet, as well as a couple of quant career guides available on the Internet. However, they don't clear my biggest doubt - do I have any reasonable chance of getting an interesting internship being a Polish resident and a student of a non-top-tier univeristy? When it comes to my skills and experience I hope it's not so bad:
-BSc in Applied Math with a good GPA (4,76/5,00)
-well-rounded mathematical background, pretty good with stochastic calculus, statistical inference, econometrics
-good problem-solving skills (managed to nail a couple of IMC-level problems in my life)
-familiar with R and Excel/VBA, some experience with Matlab
-lots of scholarships & extra-curricular activities
-got some experience with developing and testing algo trading strategies
-C/C++ skills and specific knowledge of advanced financial modelling could be better, but my forthcoming graduate courses are likely to improve that.

I'm still wondering what else can I do to make my internship search effective. Thanks for any advice

 

[Andy Nguyen]

Being nowhere close to any big financial centers is a big hurdle. You can join an open source project, work remotely for someone. Just have to keep yourself busy with projects, paid or unpaid, supervised or sell-studied. At the end of the day, you have to show some useful skills that you develop during these time.

 

[Jacek Podlewski]

Thanks a lot for the advice, that's actually what I've been doing for some time. I also must admit that once I gained any practical experience and worked a bit on my 'networking' then some surprising job/internship opportunities appeared to me here, in Poland, as well.

 

[KaiRu]

Do you consider Finance IT option, at least for now? Last thing I've heard is that there are UBS IT in Cracow and Barclays IT in Prague.

 

[Jacek Podlewski]

I've started working on my programming skills quite recently (work, graduate courses, self-study), haven't got too much IT experience before that. However I take that as a possible option, I'd definitely feel better in an (even non-financial) IT role than in, let's say, 'ordinary' accounting. Actually a friend of mine works at Cracow UBS Office and seems to be satisfied, she's done quite a lot of VBA programming in there.

 

[Jacek Podlewski]

[Sorry for double-posting but I doubt if it's necessary to create a new thread] In my situation as described above, could for example a PRM certificate be of any help, as a confirmation of some essential knowledge that might get more international recognition than degree from a Polish university? I know it can be helpful in the Risk Management field of course, but does it make any difference in other areas? (Actually, I've recently got an idea that RM might the best career path for me anyway, as I'm feeling more passionate about stats & econometrics than "hardcore" programming...)