Internship Experience at Morgan Stanley
Introduction
I did my two month internship at Morgan Stanley(WFH) as a Technology Analyst Intern in the Summer of 2021. The internship experience was amazing.
Interview Procedure
The online examination had 3 sections — Aptitude, Computer Science fundamentals and Coding questions(3).
After that, I had 2 interviews. Personally, I felt that they were inclined towards the application part more rather than the theory.
The interview was based on —
- Data Structures, Operating System and DBMS.
- As my Resume Machine Learning projects, there was discussion on Netflix Recommendation System and the feature selection possible in that
- Application based questions on Divide and Conquer techniques and Merge Sort.
- Discussion on Projects.
This mostly differs from interviewer to interviewer.
Getting Introduced to the Firm
The first two weeks were mostly about financial/technology related trainings. (I gained a lot of interest in Finance through this).
They would divide the interns into batches and generally students who’d work on similar technologies are given same batch. Some trainings are compulsory for all.
They gave us a lot of time to get adjusted with the schedule and culture of the company..
The Project Work
We got introduced to our managers simultaneously and were introduced to the project we would be working on. My project was related to creating a POV for shifting components of cyber platform on container environments.
I had zero knowledge of Docker/Kubernetes at that time but the people around me were really supportive. I was given some Pluralsight courses to complete for having the basic hold of the technologies being used. They were really helpful with solving the doubts.
The proof of concept was made on Innovation Labs where you could create as many instances as you want and could try your hands on different operating systems without having the fear of crashing anything.(as you could always create a new one.)
The company has a flat hierarchy where you could schedule a meeting with anyone (be it an Intern/Manager/Vice President/Executive Director). Everyone in the firm encouraged networking a lot.
Pre Placement Offer Conversion Interview
In the later half, we had a PPO conversion interview where questions based on Data Structures, Object Oriented Programming, Operating Systems, Database Management System and Memory Management Questions were asked. Conceptual questions related to the project you’ve been working on were also asked. The interview lasted for around 2 hours.
The difficulty level was medium-hard. This varied from interviewer to interviewer.
The criteria taken for conversion to a Full Time Employee is your Manager’s review, Executive Director’s review and PPO conversion interview.
The Final Presentation
We had to present our final presentation of project work in the project fair where anyone in the firm can join, ask questions and interact with you.
Result
The entire experience was really enriching. Even being in the virtual environment, the entire internship experience felt so real. It felt like everyone is there to support you.
The entire experience was much more than just technical learnings. It was about networking, getting to know about the culture and a lot of overall development. The PPO conversion result was positive!
