Siu Yu LEUNG

BSc in Risk Management Science
Hang Seng Bank

I worked as an intern at the Retail Portfolio Management Department in Hang Seng Bank for the past year. During my internship, I completed various assignments and gained invaluable experience.

During the year, I wrote different kinds of monthly reports and performed ad-hoc tasks. As I worked in the Retail Portfolio Management Department, most of my work was related to retail products, such as credit cards, personal loans and mortgages. For example, I monitored the monthly card authorisation rate to detect if there were any sharp rises or drops in the approval rate. I also analysed weekly bankruptcy cases, trying to identify some characteristics of or patterns across these customers. Also, I investigated merchants for fraud aimed at swindling money from customers and banks.

From these assignments, I now understand much more about retail credit risks. For example, there were a large variety of retail products. Each product had different properties and required different measures to manage their risk. Moreover, my programming and computer skills improved a lot with my colleagues’ instructions and repeated practice.

Apart from learning hard skills, I also gained many soft skills. First, teamwork was vital in the office and the division of labour was always necessary for greater efficiency. Furthermore, time management was important as there was always more than one task to accomplish and prioritisation was essential.

Overall, this internship was a rewarding experience to learn, and to connect study and work. So, do not miss the chance if you have the opportunity to work as an intern!

Hei Ming CHENG

BSc in Risk Management Science
Lund University, Sweden

During the first half of 2017, I experienced a very fruitful semester in Lund University, Sweden. The mathematical statistics courses in Lund University suited my academic needs unexpectedly well. During the time of being an exchange student, I left some of the specific investigation in my major study like investment strategy for a period, and went back to the inevitable fundamentals, statistics and mathematics.

During the training in Lund University, I was introduced into non-parametric inference. I found that the investigation in statistical convergence is very crucial when it comes to different applications like simulation techniques, confidence intervals of parameter estimates and statistical model fitting. Also the study in empirical distribution contributes a lot in survival analysis, actuarial science and non-parametric bootstrap. Only through understanding the mathematics behind can we ensure whether we are using the statistical tools in the correct way and right situation. By learning statistical inference, I believe I am able to take several steps further when I return back to my specific major study.

Besides, I took some courses highly related to my major study, which are Monte-Carlo Simulation and Extreme Value Theory. The simulation course exactly covered the materials which are not taught in the course RMSC4001, such as sequential importance sampling, markov chain monte-carlo and bootstrap techniques. Although it introduced the random number generation and variance reduction techniques in the beginning, most of the contents were still fresh to me. The extreme value course is mostly about modeling the extreme values in 3 different approach, which are block maxima, threshold model and point process, and the relations between their respective statistical distributions.

Last but not least, I took a Swedish introductory course for international students in the very beginning of the semester. I met friends from different countries there and we all agreed that Swedish is a vague language to learn.