Hello, everyone. My name is Annetta Li, and I'm currently a senior, double majoring in economics and statistics. As you can see from the title, I worked in internet finance this past summer. First, let me give you a little bit of background information on the firm that I worked at. 

I worked in Hamon Investment Group. It is a boutique asset management firm. So that means it's about 50 employees in the firm. And we are located on the 35th floor of this beautiful skyscraper in central Hong Kong. 

That's my building. And this is the view I have of Hong Kong. And this is IFC, which was one of the tallest building of Hong Kong located in central. 

Some of you might have this impression of finance in terms of being, I use Excel 24/7, and I do quantitative analysis on a day to day basis. And you might think, well, asset management, you just manage the money that your clients give you by investing in stocks or different financial products. How fun could that be? 

I felt the same before I started my work. However, I actually interned in the newly established subsidiary, that focus on investment strategy through social media. We were focused on developing this online e-trading, social media platform. I know it's a mouthful. 

We have seven people in our group. So we have a director, the advisor, a CEO, the business analyst, and two technicians and me, the intern. What do I exactly mean by an online e-trade and social media platform? 

So our target market was China. There was a trend in China for companies to enter and explore the market of internet finance, e-commerce, peer to peer lending, et cetera. Many major information firms, including Baidu and Sina, started acquiring banks or investment banks to open up online stock trading platforms. 

Well, we wanted to do the same. But we wanted to do it with a twist. Instead of just doing stock trading, we also wanted to allow people to build portfolios on our platform. So that includes thinking about risk analysis, asset allocation, and diversification of portfolio and all that sort of stuff when you're building your little investment portfolio online. 

The social media component comes in when people start interacting on our platform and start to have group conversations with each other, talking about their asset choices and why they make these choices. In the end, our ultimate goal is to have people invest in other's portfolios, to end up having this social media network of people investing. 

And what did I do as an intern? My job title was intern analyst. However, this job title actually encompassed a wide range of tasks. So because we're entering a new market, I was responsible for researching and brainstorming about some of the existing products and potential competitors, and also coming up with a strategy to better position ourself as a product to enter this new market, and how we can do it better than everyone else. 

I did a lot of research on the big companies and the competition that they were hosting in order to promote their platforms. And we were thinking about attaining a similar group to host inter university competitions for university students, so we would have an established user base before we even have this platform open up to the public. 

And I also worked with my CEO on the budgeting component. What that means is we use Excel to create this forum to see how we can measure our outsourced company's performance and how that would match up with our expectation, and what each component will cost us-- well, what is the price of each component that they need? 

Another component would be attracting sponsors. So I got to draft up some documents that we distributed to a lot of the finance universities in China, and to attract their sponsorship and willingness to cooperate with us, whether that is coming up with a class curriculum or to help us better come up with a strategy to test our platform. And also-- another thing is to make them want their students to come participate in our competition and use our platform both for class uses. 

Other than that, I got to design a user interface. That is working with color schemes and seeing what people would like, what would make sense, to have which button where and to have what kind of graphs on a phone, or what web site. I got to work with the designer a little bit. And that was really fun at the later stage. 

I was liaison between analysts and technicians, because it could be difficult when you have technicians who don't really talk finance and you have business analyst who don't really know much about technology. So I was able to utilize knowledge I learned from college, interestingly. 

So you help the technician understand the equations that we are working with and seeing how we can transform those into coding, and also help the business analyst to understand why the technician is coding at the same time. So that is a very big part. And lastly, planning our marketing timeline and outreach targets and just seeing the entire campaign coming together was part of my job. 

Well, what did I learn from this experience? Well, first of all, communication is key. Like I was saying, I work in a group of seven people. So that's pretty small. And it's definitely-- I think communication is definitely the key component when you have to have a cohesive working environment and making sure everyone's on the same page. When you are developing a new product, entering a new market have this similar mindset. 

Your peers are your best resources. I learned the most from the people that I talked with every day. And that is definitely one thing that I know much more about and I value much more now. Take criticism with positivity, and always ask for ways you can improve. 

I was very grateful that my CEO constantly pulled me aside to encourage me-- yes, you're doing well-- but also telling me, you could include a little bit in these components and I'm here to support you. And that was very much what I'm grateful for and how I became more comfortable on the job. 

Things you learn in classes, they're useful. The equation part, the modeling part, the building and the liberal arts thinking parts are very useful when you're on the job. And you definitely learn more from interning with smaller groups. 

You get to do more. You get to cover different parts different at different times of your internship of the projects. And you definitely get to help others and see what they're doing with their tasks. 

And asset management can [INAUDIBLE] looking interesting, because I thought they were just very traditional and very straightforward forward with what they do, MS stocks, do quantitative analysis, and make decisions. But this internship was very much more fun than what I thought it would be. 

As you can see, I definitely enjoyed my summer internship. And I really want to thank McCulloch Center for giving me this opportunity. Going forward, as a senior, I am now back to the job hunting. 

This internship taught me to be open minded about the career choices I have in front of me, whether that is going to a smaller firm, or bigger firm, start up a culture or big corporations. I'm keeping my options open, except for the yoga thing. 

And also, the intersections between our fields in finance are growing and they are much more fun. They have a lot of opportunities and industries, I definitely would want to research a little bit more between intersession of fields instead of just straight forward one field. 

And lastly, an internship in finance does not mean working with Excel 24/7. And you do much more fun stuff. Thank you so much.