Aman Srivastava is a 4th year student in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. Read on as he recounts his experience of working with Citigroup, Pune during the summers of 2016.

Making it there

Citigroup arrives on the campus for interns fairly early during the internship season. Though the company only invites applications from Computer Science, Electronics and Electrical students, you are given an option to send your resume to them even if you are not in the mentioned branches and have a good programming background. They do shortlist people from the resumes they receive, as in my case.

The rest of the process is pretty standard. They have an initial programming and general aptitude test comprising of multiple choice questions on Data Structures and Algorithms and 2 stand alone coding questions. The test is pretty long so make sure you maintain your seriousness and focus throughout. Also you have an option to choose between C++ and JAVA depending on your comfort before starting the test. Once you clear the test, you have to go through a technical interview followed by an HR round. Both of these rounds are pretty easy to crack. They mainly judge you on your personality, communication skills and extra curriculars.

Work

Citi likes to call itself “An IT firm with a banking licence”. So evidently the company puts a lot of focus on the quality of its software infrastructure, all the software that the company uses over the world is developed internally. Something that is equally putting off and fascinating, depending on how you look at it, is that the firm is extremely concerned by the security of its network, meaning that you are not allowed to install anything on your system that is not approved by the IT team. Sometimes the approval process takes weeks to complete.

Sex and the Citi

As far as the workload is concerned, it is not really taxing. You might even feel too unoccupied at work at times, but then you really learn to ask people for work. The aim of the internship is not to contribute humongous amounts of code but to get a glimpse into the corporate world and see how Citi as an institution functions. The work hours usually depend on the team you have been assigned to. For me, I usually worked from 11-7 on regular days. The company requires you to wear formals to work except on fridays.

The workplace

You are basically assigned a project that you have to complete and present it during the final week of your intern. All of the interns have generally their own independent projects in different teams. As a part of the CIB (Corporate Investment Banking) team, I had to deal with the Investment Bankers who were part of Citi Offices over the world and develop software as per their requirements. I was able to complete three different projects during my time there. One of them involved automating the process of rollback, backup and network filecopy while deployment of applications by other developers. The project was immediately pushed to production and became popular with all the developers within no time, by the time I left it was being used by over a hundred applications. Another project that I worked on was to parse SQL stored procedures before sending them to deployment, the parser I developed was written in Groovy which is a Java framework. During the intern I got experience with working with shell scripting, Java, .NET MVC, Angular.js and several other technologies are being used in the industry currently.

The workspace given to you is equipped with dual monitors and a desk phone. Since all the interns are in different teams, you might not even see some of them regularly. The company offers a lot of perks at workplace. There are numerous coffee/tea and vending machine across the floor, these are also accompanied by foosball tables and carrom boards.

The office is located at Pune’s most beautiful IT park, other giants around citi are Barclays, Symantec, Vodafone, Credit Suisse etc. Every cluster in the IT park has its own huge cafeteria with vendors like Subway, Dominos etc. Believe me, out of all the things, you won’t get bored of the food.

Place

Pune offers you all the luxuries of a metropolitan while subtly maintaining its rustic feel. Depending on how you like to spend your evenings, the city has everything on display, be it nightlife or just a pleasant walk around the park. Locals say that if you drive towards any direction for about 50 kilometers you are bound to find yourself amidst hills.

Kyunki second saturday bank holiday hota hai

The city, referred to as the oxford of the east, has an awesome artsy presence. The theatres are almost always featuring an acclaimed play and the city has a great pub-quizzing scene. There are music shows, circuses, fairs, food tasting meets, book clubs, developer seminars and what not happening almost always. And as a bonus, the city has India’s largest Crossword, also the weather is always pleasant.

Summing up

The overall experience gained during this intern was very rewarding. I was lucky to meet nice people who made it feel like home and enriched the stay further. At the end of two months you really begin to know what you really want to do with your career and if you are a little more introspective, even with your life as a whole. The internship succeeds remarkably in giving you a peek into the corporate world and familiarizes you with the sparkly world of wall street finance.

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