Steve CHAN

BSc in Risk Management Science
UBS AG

It was my great honour to join the Industrial Placement Program (IPP) at UBS AG last year. During this one-year internship, I was involved in many different projects to automate and improve processes throughout the trade lifecycle. I played different roles in these projects, including that of a business analyst, a developer and even a project manager overseeing the progress of the projects. Majoring in RMSC helped me greatly in this internship, especially in terms of hard skills and financial knowledge.

In terms of hard skills, the advanced courses enabled me to develop my programming muscles. Because coding is required for derivatives pricing and simulation in some courses, the training in Excel VBA and R enabled me to perform my tasks in the internship. The machine learning and data analysis courses also helped me acquire both the theoretical knowledge and practical skills to process large amounts of data.

In terms of financial knowledge, RMSC courses provided me with a deep understanding of various kinds of financial products and exotic derivatives, rather than merely descriptive financial knowledge. For instance, CBBC (Callable Bull/Bear Contract), Variance Swap and other ‘real-world’ products were covered in these courses. Although stochastic calculus and the pricing of exotic derivatives might not have been much use in my internship work, studying these topics helped me to understand the nature and the background operations of these structured products. Surprisingly, these lessons facilitated my adaptability at the bank and smoothed the process of developing automation and process improvements.

In addition to this technical work, my internship provided opportunities to chair meetings and to present in front of a large audience. I had confidence in my presentation skills due to the reading courses in the RMSC curriculum. The experience of presenting selected topics or news in the financial industry has helped me prepare to go through technical material with an audience. I believe that this kind of soft skill is of utmost importance in my work because my responsibility goes beyond coding and delivery. I need to ask questions and explain my logic to different stakeholders, and any misunderstandings could lead to work having to be redone or, in the worst case, SFC fines. Therefore, good communication skills can help me to manage stakeholders’ expectations and, of course, reduce the risk in what I deliver.

Overall, this one-year internship gave me a glimpse of real-world practices and an opportunity to transfer what I have learnt in the RMSC courses to the workplace. Again, I am most grateful to UBS AG and the Department of Statistics for this opportunity and for their support.

CHENG, Hei Ming

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.