Trevor Goertzen's Intern Reflections

I took the first few days of December off to study for my CFA exam on the 3rd.  It's hard to say if I passed, but I was a bit disappointed with the Schweser study materials after the exam.  

In December, I spent time simplifying my role as much as possible to make my exit smoother.  A lot of the consultants I worked with are done as well - so some of my work with them won't be necessary in January anyways.  

All in all, I had a great term at Talisman and am pleased to be going back to school for my final semester.

November has been my busiest month at Talisman.  As I've become a key part of a certain reporting process that delivers a report to the most senior leaders, and the report's requirements and due dates are quite unexpected, I've spent a lot of of time in conference rooms cranking out VBA as fast as I can while my team members help.  I work well under pressure, so it was fun for me, but I could definitely feel the heat in those rooms. 

In October, I was assigned to a new team.  The new team was quite a change for me because the technical aspect of the work is totally different, and my team members are all Accenture consultants.  Being consultants on the SAP project, they have a very high work load and don't work normal hours. Because of that I've had some tight deadlines and late nights.  It's been very informative to me to learn about the consulting business though.  I have to say, being a traveling worker does sound interesting - but like they all say, it gets old.

In September, I finished much of my main programming project.  It was nice to be done but I had down time with that project being done.  I made good use of my time by networking with a lot of people (mostly research associates from various banks).  I also spent time perfecting my resume and applying to jobs as September is the primary recruiting season. 

August was a very busy month for me. Because a couple of my projects were due to be released, I worked the most I've worked in my life.  I don't mind because if I go into banking I should be used to working those hours, but it was definitely exhausting.  I'm still busy now because I have to catch up on my CFA studying.  It feels good to be productive though. 

During July, I started on a fairly big project.  I am developing an application that will shows business users legacy database values with their respective SAP database values as well as other legacy information required to keep the legacy apps running.  In case anyone is interested, it's developed using a Fluent NHibernate data layer connecting to an Oracle database and exposed through a .NET web service to a standard HTML page that dynamically displays a pageable, searchable, sortable table using JQuery.  I'm pretty familar with all the technologies I used, but the novel thing about this project for me is probably handling the performance implications associated with the amount of data involved.  In short, I've mitigated the issue through the implementation of a nightly caching system. 

In June, I continued my networking and met with a gas trading fundamentals analyst.  I have to say his job sounds to be the most interesting I've come accross so far.  Fundamentals analysts develop reports and tools that allow traders and analysts to accurately perceive near-term fundamental dynamics, including storage change, demand by secot rand by region, and supply.  A fundamental analyst role involves a lot of model-generation and programming, and I think it would be a great use of my skillsets.  Unfortunately, a masters degree is required, so in the near-term it's out of scope for my job search.

As one might expect, I didn't have much work to do in my first month. I used my time to do a lot of networking, and met with many of the CFAs within the company.  The value of networking in my first month here will likely be more valuable to me than my last two internships combined.  I was introduced to a natural gas trader through one of the CFAs I met with, and after learning about his role and how I can get into that field, I'm now set to write my Chartered Market Technician (CMT) exam in October, and my Chartered Financial Analyst exam in December.