I have been an intern at Trading Technologies for a little over a month now, and not one person has asked me to get them a coffee. What gives?
I’ve been contributing in marketing team meetings, editing blog posts and marketing documents, and helping with event planning. I’ve participated on a lot of important projects and am learning a lot about working on a marketing team within a larger company.
When I talk to my supervisors, they give me feedback on what I’m doing, give me more non-coffee fetching assignments to complete and ask if I’m doing O.K.
My main question is: what am I doing wrong? I thought interns were just glorified coffee couriers. I’m happy to know I’m wrong. My fellow interns are faring just as well. They are:
Thomas Brethauer: Thomas is a computer science major and rising junior at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. This summer, he is assisting in developing a testing structure for the price client API. Essentially, he is helping the price team run both stress and functionality tests to make sure that the code they wrote will continue to work if changes or improvements are made to the API.
Laura Chan: Laura is helping transition our company-wide internal project management site to a new knowledge base that contains accessible information on TT’s processes and tools, which are used to help execute projects in an efficient manner. She attends daily “stand-up” and sprint planning meetings with all project managers and works with a variety of teams, gaining a wealth of experience. Laura is going into her senior year at Lehigh University.
Megan Hoggatt: Megan works with the Intellectual Property team to come up with strategies for patent prosecution (i.e., to turn our engineers’ and other employees’ ideas into patents so we can continue to innovate in this industry) and assist with managing our IP portfolio. She is a third-year law student at Chicago-Kent, graduating this December.
Jonathan Lenchard-Warren: Jon is going to be a junior at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He’s double majoring in economics and political science and plans on attending law school in the future. The big project he’s working on is updating the information in TT’s exchange product database, which is a list matching exchanges, product names, product symbols and more.
Adityan Melarkode: Adi will be a junior next year at SUNY Buffalo studying computer science. He is working on writing unit tests for the algo team using their testing framework. The goal is to write many test cases to increase test coverage, and automate the tests so that they automatically run every morning and inform developers if an issue is discovered.
Alex Page: Alex is hard at work setting up software quality testing for the User Setup interface in the TT® platform, which will allow the team to ensure that features they add will work seamlessly in production. He also attends many team meetings and works directly on the platform, adding new features and fixing bugs. He is a senior in computer engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Kaundinya “Kaundy” Pochampally: Kaundy is a finance and economics major with a computer science minor at Indiana University. He will be a senior this coming fall. His first project was developing a real-time utility to ensure that price data is correct on the TT platform. Kaundy is looking forward to working on various upcoming projects and collaborating with other departments.
Charlie Piggot: Charlie is going into his junior year at New York University. He is working on a tool that can easily stop, start and restart connections to an exchange. This makes it easier for TT’s engineers to restart connections, get data on the connection and more.
Dan Ruswick: Dan is working on a data retrieval system. He expects to start working on data analysis and automated report generation for packet data. He is a rising junior at Northwestern University.
Kelly Shine: Kelly is busy working as a Marketing and Human Resources intern. She splits her time planning events like MarketsWiki’s World of Opportunity and the ITA Day of Volunteering, and helping with the organization of our internal What’s on Tap company-wide meetings. She is also creating a student ambassador initiative for the TT CampusConnect™ program and working on recruiting events while learning about the process for new hires.
Will Wolfe: My desk neighbor, Will is a sophomore at Dartmouth University. Though currently undeclared, he is working with the IT department. Will’s current duties involve performing an office-wide audit and making sure that everyone’s tech is up and working in the way that it should.
Karen Xu: Karen is a junior at the University of Chicago where she is majoring in computer science and visual arts. Currently she is working on designing templates for internal emails and graphics for company announcements.
Then we get to the intern pool’s own Three Musketeers. This trio includes: Garrett O’Grady (junior, University of Dayton), Michelle Ross (senior, University of Chicago) and David Yan (junior, Duke University). All three are packed in a neat pod, have the same major in computer science and are working on resolving software bugs as they are discovered through our internal test processes. They insisted on being interviewed for this blog as a group and have, since the inception of the internship, proven to be inseparable.
As for me, I am a recent graduate of Saint Xavier University (go Cougs). Some of my projects include putting together case studies for the TT CampusConnect program, editing blog posts, helping with the upcoming MarketsWiki World of Opportunity event that we’re hosting at TT next Friday and assisting with a lot of social media projects.
While I’ve been having fun getting to know my fellow interns, we are currently embroiled in a stiff trading competition to see who can generate the most profit in a simulated environment using the TT platform.
At our joint lunch breaks, it may be all smiles and small talk, but the competition is real, and I’ve been surprised to learn what skilled traders some of us are. Regretfully, I am not among those skilled traders, though I dearly aspire to be.
Thankfully, TT gives me many other goals to reach for throughout the course of a day. But, I’ll keep trying and learning.