The quarantine year of 2020 was quite unsettling for my academic as well as professional life. I finished my 3rd year at IIIT Bangalore in a pretty mundane fashion and my academic semester didn't go as well as I had anticipated while my GSoC application for summer 2020 also got rejected. This meant I had the whole summer for introspection and the preparation of the eventual internship drive for summer 2021, starting in the following academic year.

As it happened, I managed to land the internship at Morgan Stanley(MS) for the summer of 2021. Honestly, the internship selection process is very uncertain and unpredictable, and who knows how much of luck is involved in getting selected for one. Fortunately, my preparation was enough that luck was by my side during the selection process.

Pre-internship Activities

Getting the confirmation for the internship opportunity for summer 2021 in October 2020 meant the next few months were spent in anticipation of any communication from the company officials. Eventually, I received the offer letter and the code of conduct document to sign around December 2020.

After this, the next point of contact occurred in April 2021 when MS gave Pluralsight license for me to go through the recommended courses that will help me throughout my internship. The courses were Java fundamentals, Machine Learning Basics, Data Structures Refreshers, Web Frameworks and many more. And us interns were expected to complete these courses before the beginning of the internship on May 17th, 2021. This period of time being the semester end, with this additional workload, resulted in quite a few sleepless nights.

And finally a week before the internship, I received a RSA-encrypted key which enables remote login into MS desktops. With this being my first experience of the corporate world, I was really excited for the internship to start.

Onboarding

The first week was all about getting the remote desktop setup using the RSA key, attending sessions to understand the organizational structure at MS, getting myself familiar with MS development environment and most importantly, getting acquainted with my manager and team members. The manager of course is the closest point of contact with the organization, but for every intern, there was a buddy associated who was another team member just to help me get comfortable with everything.

Soon I got my schedule for the following weeks' training sessions and my manager also set meetings up for me with different teams in the department, which by the way was Operations Technology (OpsTech). So my official designation was Summer Technology Analyst, OpsTech, Morgan Stanley.

Training Sessions

The first 3 odd weeks were jam-packed with training sessions conducted by full time analysts at MS. Every intern was assigned multiple tracks which encompassed a certain number of training sessions specific for that track. And there were common tracks for all the interns.

I was assigned the Java, AIML and the generics track which contained various topics from the basic concepts to advanced frameworks. We were expected to complete the Pluralsight equivalent courses of the tracks and the provided assignments before each training session. The training sessions themselves were 2-3 hours long interactive sessions for each topic which meant the first 3 weeks were completely devoted to go through the trainings.

Project Work

After the gruelling training session weeks, I finally got a chance to work on the project that I was assigned. Prior to this, my manager had recommended me some courses to complete on Pluralsight to get acquainted with the tech-stack of my project. My project was titled as Filesystem-Kafka-PostgreSQL data pipeline and that is as much information as I can disclose :)

At each step of the project, my manager as well as my buddy were of immense help. Working on a completely new technology of Kafka, I was facing a lot of hindrances but my manager would schedule meetings with different people within MS who could help me out in case he couldn't.

I also had the privilege of attending the scrum standups of my manager's team everyday. Everyone would present their update for the day in that meeting including me. It was an incredible insight into how corporate projects are managed and how the work is distributed and collated.

Interview and Project Showcase

At Morgan Stanley, the summer interns have to go through another round of interviews by the end of their internship for the pre-placement conversion to a full time analyst. Wrapping up the project, writing the documentation and preparing for the conversion interview, all came upon me in no time and caused a lot of stress. Thankfully, my conversion interview was two weeks before the internship end and I had enough time to complete my project to my satisfaction.

A company-wide project showcase was arranged for all the summer interns where anyone in the company could attend any project talk that the interns were giving. On this day, we had to present our project 4 times during different times for different audiences. In addition to that, I presented my project on 2 separate occassions to my team and to other people from my division.

So after presenting the project 6 times, on July 16th, I bid adieu to everyone in my team and had a long chat with my manager about my future with the company.

Post-internship

We were sent a goodie bag for our participation as summer interns at Morgan Stanley a couple weeks later. And finally on July 30th, I received an offer letter staing I was accepted for Morgan Stanley's Technology Analyst Program for 2022. Without any hesitation, I accepted the offer and am looking forward to working at MS once again.