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=…

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