In the final weeks of our summer internship, we asked four of our interns to share their biggest takeaways, the skills they developed, and the projects they were most proud of.
Tell me a little bit about yourself and what you’re doing at the firm this summer.
Eashna: I’m originally from Monroe Township in New Jersey, but I moved out west for school at UC Berkeley where I study business. I work for the Alumni Relations department there and serve at a local restaurant. I’m involved in Cal’s ultimate frisbee team and the Indian student association as well. This summer, I’m interning for Point72 Ventures. My team has a horizontal view of the Ventures portfolio, and so I do a lot of data analysis to help drive insights for the different investment teams.
Mohit: I’m from Cary, North Carolina, and I’m going to be a senior this fall at the University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign where I am studying computer science and linguistics. I am also involved in a tech consulting club at school. My role this summer at Point72 is a Quant Dev Intern on the Cubist Central Research team. We interface with a lot of portfolio managers and provide central tools for PMs including trade execution, so there’s a generalized trading system for PMs to use and similar solutions that we can use across different teams. Currently I’m assisting the team with enhancements to one of our trading systems to make orders more efficient.
Gia: I grew up in New York City, and am going into my senior year at Williams College, majoring in economics and English. I am a member of our equestrian team and am involved with the Riley’s Way Foundation which supports young people in becoming kind leaders. This summer I interned as a Canvas Fundamental Research Analyst within Market Intelligence. I would describe our work as uncovering and synthesizing industry trends to tell an overarching narrative on why an industry has evolved the way it has.
William: I was born and raised in Nashville, Tennessee and I go to Vanderbilt University, so I’ve been in Nashville for a long time. I study math and economics, minoring in history, English, and business. Extracurricular wise, I’m involved in a lot of pre-law activities, including a pre-law frat and club. At Point72, I am an Operations Intern on the Fixed Income Operations team. When the firm places trades, we help make sure those trades get booked and that all the assets end up in the right places. What I specifically do is assist with automating processes that my team is currently completing manually.
What is your biggest takeaway from your time at Point72?
Eashna: The importance of relationships and understanding people, whether it be for sourcing founders or just network expansion.
Mohit: I’ve learned a lot about the importance of scoping out exactly what needs to be done on a project and really figuring out the best way to tackle it before you just jump in is very important in a fast-paced industry.
Gia: My biggest takeaway from this summer has been developing my research process, which was influenced by everyone I worked with. Our teams gave us patience and empathy, and all the tools that we needed to approach our work as we shifted industry coverage very quickly. With that, the expectation was to quickly adapt our work processes as we rotated.
William: A Point72 employee came and talked to all the Operations interns about how he learned Python recently and how useful it was in his career, so I sat down and learned Python. Overall, my big takeaway is coding can really improve a lot of these manual processes and can really make people’s lives easier, save a lot of time, and reduce errors.
What skills did you develop during your internship?
Eashna: I’m someone who sometimes gets caught up in the interesting little details of a project, but I’ve learned to also take a step back and look at the broader picture to discover trends and highlight digestible takeaways for an audience. This skill helped me tackle large datasets during my internship.
Mohit: Working across multiple teams and with multiple people. Since I’m an intern, reaching out especially about the domain specific stuff and gaining knowledge from different people and interfacing with them has been very important. Since we are a central team, we interface with a lot of PMs, so really just interacting with them and being an effective provider to them as consumers.
Gia: An ability to hold onto the lesson learned from failure, but not the feeling of discouragement. I think the people who do the best here are the ones who are not afraid to take risks, learn fast, move on from failure, in order to actively contribute to the team.
William: Understanding how to think about the business as a whole. From the operations perspective, we kind of see everything that’s happening in the business. However, in trying to understand why the business is built like that it is important to ask questions like, why do all these processes work? And delving into the idea that everything was made for a reason.
What project have you worked on this summer that you would say you’re most proud of?
Eashna: I was definitely proud of my co-investors analysis project. The project analyzed Point72 Ventures performance across investment rounds, focusing on the impact of institutional investor participation. It was also interesting to identify angel investors in the ventures space that could be important connections especially at the early stages of a startup.
Mohit: Cubist has a specific trading system with a lot of different components, and one of them obviously, is risk. You want to manage risk as a hedge fund. And so specifically I’m working on making those risk checks a lot faster so that when PMs enter their orders, the orders must meet a certain criterion, otherwise they won’t get entered. So those risk checks must be met, and that can be a slow process. It must happen before an order goes out on the open market. So, I have been tasked with helping make that faster so we can reduce the time it takes for an order to be input and to be filled or put on the market.
Gia: My favorite project I worked on this summer was a supply chain presentation. We researched how an industry and the companies within it work to understand how they all fit together. I am proud of the process we developed to ramp up on these spaces, and the speed at which we were able do this.
William: I built out an automation that basically takes the really complex logic of what bond corporate actions we care about and what dates are upcoming, what dates are new, and generates a report automatically for the team so that they’re spending less time just chewing through each of these individual events, but getting the readout of what’s new and what we actually need to be focusing on for the day.
What is one piece of advice you would give to an incoming Point72 intern?
Eashna: I would say take advantage of the resources that Point72 has to offer—namely, the people. My team has been amazing and always willing to answer any questions. I feel like this is a great way to learn and determine where you might fit in at such a dynamic firm.
Mohit: Be ready to learn a lot. I feel like, unrelated to the numbers part of finance, there’s a lot in this world and there’s so much application. I feel like people in finance are very open to pretty much everything, and that’s why I feel like you can learn so much. So I feel like there’s a lot of actually bringing theory to practice in this world and then also just learning a lot. There’s so much to do in finance.
Gia: Get really comfortable being open and vulnerable with your team about what you do and don’t know. But maybe more importantly, come in curious and wanting to learn as much as possible! When you get here, don’t stop asking questions—not just about the work you are doing, but also about the people around you, their perspectives, and how they view the world.
William: Constantly try to learn, come in with a curiosity and try to understand everything that your team does at every level, at the high level, at the granular level. Just be curious because that curiosity is going to pay off dividends later when you’re doing the task, because you’ve already tried to understand what’s going on and how it fits into the broader team. So, I think that with curiosity, you gain the knowledge that you need to be an effective intern and be an effective employee possibly in the future.
What is a fun fact about you?
Eashna: My dog weighs more than me!
Mohit: I really like to rock climb.
Gia: I am going to Keuka Lake with my family for our annual reunion, and we are all going cliff jumping together.
William: I have seen the movie Dune: Part 2 six times.