Business Intelligence Internship – Summer 2016

As part of our continuing effort to foster excellence in our product offerings, we host a demanding, ongoing internship program for college students.  We’ve offered internships for more than a decade, but this season’s effort was different, as it focused on combining modern business intelligence tools with our own risk analytic platforms and APIs to develop financial dashboards and reporting tools for the investment community.

Financial Dashboards

Dashboards are becoming an industry must-have. TS Imagine’s customized dashboards provide clients with powerful financial analytics, business metrics, and current performance to measure and evaluate risk, all with a flat learning curve.  Dashboards seemed a natural focal point – and great opportunity – for our interns.

The interns received comprehensive training and mentoring at TS Imagine. Once their initial training ended, they began working side-by-side with both our Quantitative Analysts and Business Intelligence Analysts gaining insight and hands-on experience.

On the last day of their internship, they presented a company-wide demonstration of their dashboards. Each intern presented and demonstrated their contributions to the final project to us as if we were clients. They presented dashboards for the following investment strategy types:

• Global Macro
• Long Short Equity
• Fixed Income
• FX
• Commodities

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Slideshow of intern dashboards

Team Collaboration

TS Imagine works as a team, and we extended that core value to our interns. The end result was a group of interns who enjoyed both their interaction with each other and with others throughout the company.  The team experience offered them exposure to many different roles in the Business Intelligence process, which gave them a much more comprehensive understanding than they could have gained if on their own.

Here’s what the interns said they appreciated about our program:

• Learning the basics in finance, JavaScript, and data visualization. They then took what they learned and developed dashboards they felt would provide value. Our Interns liked the level of freedom they had to define team roles, design visuals, and code dashboard behavior while still remaining a cohesive group.
• Our Consulting Group guided the interns, providing them with the information they needed to understand the real world applications of the dashboards they created.
• Our strategy experts provided them with the ability to better understand the rationale behind the projects they were working on.
• The interns were mainly from technical or quantitative backgrounds that do not generally require presentation skills as part of their curricula. We wanted to give them the experience of giving a presentation to a company-wide group of professionals on a complex subject. In the end, they were proud to present tools that were actually meaningful, useful, and of tangible value.

Schools and programs we’ve recruited from for our internships:

• Rutgers – Master of Quantitative Finance Program, Master of Science in Mathematics – Mathematical Finance Program
• Stevens Institute of Technology – Quantitative Finance, Business Intelligence (both undergraduate programs)
• University of Texas at Arlington – Master of Science in Industrial Engineering Program
• Johns Hopkins University – Master of Science in Applied Mathematics and Statistics Program

Our internship is offered all year, and if you’re interested in being considered for any of our sessions (Fall, Winter, Spring, Summer), email  Dwayne Fauvell.

About the Author

Trever Evans has been with TS Imagine for eleven years and has been participating in scoping, development, and implementation of larger scale initiatives for TS Imagine. He holds an MS in Quantitative Financial Economics from Oklahoma State University. He is currently Director of Consulting for TS Imagine.

Contact Trever by email or phone: 646-827-4483.