Financial Sector 

Financial Sector

Being raised by parents that both worked in the Financial Sector for the better part of their lives, conversations about investments, or annuities over the dinner table were a usual occurrence. I remember hearing the words “Don’t work for your money, make your money work for you” and the idea of using monetary assets to exponentialize them fascinated me.

Concepts like Utils and Dollars/Rupees awoke my interest in a way Pascals and Amperes couldn’t. So, I decided to pursue a Bachelor’s Degree in Commerce from Delhi University. This programme taught me about accounting and management techniques and helped me broaden my interest in the bigger and wider world of finance in its entirety. To gain practical experience, I secured an internship with HDFC Ergo that introduced me to the ‘Principles of Insurance’ focussing predominantly on Marine Hull Insurance – their forte. Working alongside the analytics team, I was exposed to the domain of Business Analysis through predicting rates that could maximise their firm’s profits. I was fascinated by the potential of analytics and its use in predictive modelling. This enlightened me that business analytics is capable of supporting the businesses with intuitive insights of historical & transactional data using data mining, analytic, and advanced modelling techniques and forecasting the risks and opportunities for the future.

With enhanced interest, I strengthened my attention and focussed on business analysis and took this fascination forward during the second year of my under graduation too. This time I chose to intern with the analytics team at MetLife GOSC. I was working alongside a team whose job was to analyse trends of non-derivative securities in the EMEA [Europe Middle East Africa] region and, based on the analysis, make a decision to invest the firm’s funds with an objective to maximise their rate of return. I was mentored to get my hands-on experience in data sorting using Excel according to the company’s SOP. This data then helped the team to run their algorithms and develop models that eventually enabled them make well-informed decisions for further action. I was intrigued by how these algorithms were run but lacked the know-how at the time.

Consequentially, to strengthen my very rudimentary skills in analytics, I applied for a summer term at Harvard University in their Business Analytics Program. It was here that my horizons truly broadened. By running codes in Excel/R Studio and developing models based on Regression Analysis on datasets of actual companies, I understood the real need and application of Business Analytics to the world of Finance. At Harvard, I worked on an individual project ‘Dow Jones Industrial Average’ and a group project on Amazon. To understand the subject matter, its analogy, and limits, I took every chance to gain as much knowledge as was possible. One day, I was rewarded with a journal that was written by my professor John Wang for being accurate and on point with my analytics understanding. This three-week experience was challenging in terms of coding and satisfying in terms of applying aspects of business into the data. I was absolutely convinced that I wanted to build a career in analytics as the field had the potential to be at the nerve centre of every growing and large-scale business. At Harvard, it became evident to me that in order to become a good analyst, domain knowledge was essential, and my managerial perspective of things must be complemented with a strong technical skillset.

The professionally-accredited Masters in Business Analytics course offered at your world-university is the best fit for me as it shall allow me to build on my previous qualification and skills together with providing an opportunity to apply my theoretical learning to practical applications, learn and discuss my findings and learning with a global peer group and most importantly allow me an opportunity to experiment and still excel in my domain. It is a highly personalized program with foundational courses in functional areas like Marketing in a Global Economy, along with the Supply Chain Management immersion would help me juxtapose my learnings in India to international standards of knowledge and excellence. The research-led program is so designed as to establish my understanding of the significance of research in the spectrum and augment my skills to identify and decide the scope and direction of data analytics research within the organisation and use the results for strategic decision-making.

The course is delivered by the professional academics bringing their experiences to the classroom, thus developing insights into the importance of the role of business analytics in an organisation and prepares me to work in the global work environment with contemporary industrial skills and aptitude. Understanding the different needs, competencies, and interests, the faculty adopts methodical teaching methods including group work, seminars and projects allowing the students to gain in-depth knowledge in decision-making techniques, algorithms for big data, machine learning and natural language techniques and expanding expertise to design the effective measures of organisational-performance and generate highly-competitive data-driven business. The course covers descriptive, predictive, and prescriptive analytics and the use of optimisation techniques that will transform me into a lateral thinker with extraordinary knowledge in the latest theory and practice and boosted confidence to make the big decisions about data to solve business challenges.

The program will eventually get me closer to my dream of becoming an analyst in Goldman Sachs where I aim to perform risk analysis on the financial stability and business model of client firms. I strongly believe I would thrive in this environment as it fosters innovative analytical practices for solving critical business problems, which would become the cornerstone of a successful career in this field across Industries.