Question about the appeal of side projects for non-target students.

At the risk of sounding dumb or coming off as completely ignorant, I'd like to ask a few questions about the appeal of personal initiative to a IB firms and banks.
I'm a current freshman at WP Carey. It won't exactly be the strongest part of my application for internships in the future, however I'm trying to compensate for that with initiative.
I have a pretty good foundation with C++, R, and PHP and have been programming rather intensely for the past few months and have "created" a few things:

1. A query engine that gives out visualized financial statistics such as skewness, kurtosis, HV, etc. that is all compiled from day-end data for any publicly traded stock.

2. I've been working on increasingly complex trading algorithms in C++ that determine buying points, backtest against data, and give results along with the confidence intervals, sharpe ratios, etc. A few very basic ones that I feel comfortable making public are on my site. This led to me currently working on random forest models to reduce the noise in daily pricing patterns to find slight trends in daily and weekly movements of equities given a series of past events and qualifications.

These are the kinds of things that I obviously plan to continue doing for the next three and a half years as well.

I guess what I'm wondering is how advantageous all this work will be in the eyes of possible employers, or if it will be at all. A few weeks ago I had a person in the HF industry contact me by email after seeing my work about applying for select internships at their company, but when I sent my resume they informed me I was too young to be allowed.

Any information regarding the above would be greatly appreciated!

My end goal is to get into PE or Quant, but I have a strong interest in IB.

//-----------------------------------//

Just for S&G, here's a link to the query engine I built with PHP. It has some prefilled data, but you can query pretty much anything: http://lavancier.com/research-data.php?ticker=SPY&interval=1000&period=…

3 Comments
 

Dolores quos est corporis recusandae ducimus. Fuga quo omnis ab quas doloremque et. Libero quisquam sed nemo velit ut magni nulla. Distinctio est minus est voluptatem. Unde eum et itaque ut quos porro totam.

Aut id qui mollitia dicta tenetur sed quo quisquam. Voluptatem est ut rerum libero aut non eveniet ea. Nihil id iusto tempore saepe et.

Career Advancement Opportunities

July 2026 Investment Banking

  • Evercore 01 99.4%
  • Moelis & Company 01 98.9%
  • JPMorgan 01 98.3%
  • Guggenheim Partners 01 97.7%
  • Morgan Stanley 07 97.1%

Overall Employee Satisfaction

July 2026 Investment Banking

  • Moelis & Company No 99.4%
  • Evercore No 98.9%
  • Morgan Stanley 01 98.3%
  • Banco Santander 02 97.7%
  • BMO Capital Markets 12 97.1%

Professional Growth Opportunities

July 2026 Investment Banking

  • Evercore 01 99.4%
  • Moelis & Company 01 98.9%
  • Morgan Stanley 06 98.3%
  • Goldman Sachs 01 97.7%
  • JPMorgan 01 97.1%

Total Avg Compensation

July 2026 Investment Banking

  • Vice President (16) $429
  • Associates (46) $258
  • 3rd+ Year Analyst (8) $210
  • 2nd Year Analyst (22) $179
  • Intern/Summer Associate (14) $159
  • 1st Year Analyst (80) $150
  • Intern/Summer Analyst (73) $101
notes
16 IB Interviews Notes

“... there’s no excuse to not take advantage of the resources out there available to you. Best value for your $ are the...”

Leaderboard

1
redever's picture
redever
99.2
2
kanon's picture
kanon
99.0
3
Secyh62's picture
Secyh62
99.0
4
BankonBanking's picture
BankonBanking
99.0
5
dosk17's picture
dosk17
98.9
6
Betsy Massar's picture
Betsy Massar
98.9
7
CompBanker's picture
CompBanker
98.9
8
GameTheory's picture
GameTheory
98.9
9
DrApeman's picture
DrApeman
98.9
10
Mimbs's picture
Mimbs
98.8
success
From 10 rejections to 1 dream investment banking internship

“... I believe it was the single biggest reason why I ended up with an offer...”