Technical Skills to Prep for SA S&T
Hey yall
I will be interning at a BB this upcoming summer and was wondering if there were any technical skills in particular that I should prepare for before I start my internship. Should I primarily focus on getting acquainted with VBA or would it be helpful to dive into SQL and learn some more python? For past interns, what was your experience like, and did yall use any python, VBA or SQL? I will be working on the commodity side of things btw.
It is going to be desk specific. My desk and a lot of the ones I knew other SA's on were mainly given work with VBA, but I do know one person that was told to use python for his assignments. If you know python already then VBA should be really easy to pick up, I had zero use with it in college and basically learned how to use it within 1 workday (with hella Google help ofc). If you know the basics of how to code and know how to properly search on Google for your problems, then you should be fine with both python and VBA. Imo, knowing what to search in Google is like half the work when it came to these assignments lmao. You should ask your desk for specifics though they will tell you which languages they use.
I would also definitely come into it being up to date on market trends, and thinking how your desk's product fits in to the overall macro picture. Being up to date on what is going on and how it affects your desk will be good.
Every year I have people from my school reach out and ask “what technical skill should I learn?” with a follow up on “I know sql, python, etc.” essentially a running list of programs.
Unsolicited advice - spend and focus on the soft skills equally (i.e., presentation, communication, small talks, etc.) Its crazy how smart technical interns join the desk but if you ask them to present things they struggle. Or they have some cool idea but they can’t express or simplify it enough such that some MD can understand it. The more I work in this industry, the more I realize is that its not always the most technical/quant-y person that brings the revenue. Of course, if you can do both the soft and hard skills - then great!!
At the end of the day, you are interacting with people.