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.

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.