Carens-Georgia-Pangabdi

BSc in Risk Management Science
Maples Fund Services (Asia) Limited

Last summer, I interned at Maples Fund Services (Asia) Limited for three months. During this tenure, I had the opportunity to rotate across various teams, including Fund Accounting, Registrar and Transfer Agency, Client Onboarding, and Anti-Money Laundering. My primary responsibility was to prepare a net asset value package for hedge fund clients, involving regular cash and position reconciliations, price verifications, and financial statement generation using Advent Geneva and Bloomberg Terminal. This task enhanced my knowledge of accounting and the structure of hedge funds and different types of securities. Additionally, I conducted quality assurance testing on a newly implemented Advent Geneva function aimed at automating expense booking. This involved assessing its functionality and identifying potential issues to ensure reliability and effectiveness. I also learned to provide services to the investors of the fund, especially in handling subscription and redemption requests. I gained valuable experience of analysing and extracting relevant information from the Private Placement Memorandum of both Hedge Funds and Private Equity Funds. Furthermore, I learned the steps and actions needed to identify and mitigate risks related to money laundering, terrorist financing, and other criminal activities to ensure compliance with all required regulations for the fund and its investors.

The RMSC programme equipped me with essential knowledge in finance, investments, statistics, and mathematics, which helped me gain this internship opportunity and excel during my time there. The analytical skills developed during the curriculum proved to be extremely useful in the learning process, even for the areas not explicitly covered by the programme. Overall, the curriculum provided strong support during my internship journey.

Chung Tin KOO

BSc in Risk Management Science
McGill University, Canada

It has been a wonderful experience for me to participate in the exchange programme at McGill University. I have participated in plenty of exchange activities. During the first week of arrival, McGill University provided some orientation activities for exchange students. The most valuable one was an orientation brunch. It was an event that offers a free meal and enabled exchange students to meet each other.

There were some courses that I think it is worth taking at McGill University. I took a mathematical finance course during my studies. It was a course that reviewed basic concepts of derivative pricing, and then get into the introduction of measure and probability theory, and also some more advanced discrete and continuous time mathematical models with applications in option pricing. In other words, it was like an elementary version of the stochastic calculus course offered by the CUHK RMSC programme. I was able to grab some basic stuff on this topic so that it will benefit my studies in the future. I found that the lessons in McGill and CUHK are quite different. The professor did not upload any lecture notes on the platform. Instead, he just wrote the notes on the blackboard to let students copy them. This can greatly encourage students to attend lessons. It would be hard to catch up if someone try to skip lessons.

In addition, the exchange programme benefits much on my personal growth. I have tried a lot of new stuff. For staying abroad, cooking dishes oneself is common. It means that was a chance for me to learn cooking. At first, I started up with some basic dishes like a simple spaghetti mixing with prepared pasta sauce. When I get used to it, I found cooking was fun and relaxing. Then I tried to cook some more advanced cuisines like lasagna and rib-eye steak. It was nice to build up a new hobby during this period. And I have traveled to many places to explore around the world. Opportunities were given to me to obtain some once in a lifetime experiences, like watching an NBA playoff semi-final in Toronto.

Moreover, the exchange programme provided me new inspirations towards my life and future goals. It was a precious opportunity for me to study abroad for one semester, to try something new or cannot happen in Hong Kong. I truly believe that one should treasure the opportunity when they are given a chance to do something different.