Name: Zhi Zheng
Class Year: 2020
Major: Mathematics
Hometown: Wuhan, China

Internship Organization: ChangJiang Securities
Job Title: investment management internship
Location: Wuhan, China

What’s happening at your internship?

This summer, I work as an intern at a securities company in Wuhan, China.
As a math major, I was assigned to the investment management department, where they need people to analyze data.

Why did you apply for this internship?

This company is a very famous securities company in China. As a math student minoring in economics, I feel like the financial industry is the right place for me. So I decide to apply for the role at a securities company, which I think would be helpful for my later career choice.

Can you talk about the skills you are learning and why they are important to you?

Communication plays a very critical role in investment management, especially when you negotiate with your clients. After participating in several meetings with my supervisor, I realized how people talk is much more complicated than I thought, such as how to persuade your colleagues and supervisor to support your strategy, how to negotiate with clients to make a win-win deal. Speaking is another kind of art; sometimes the way you express your statements can decide the outcome of the whole thing.

What has been the biggest challenge you have faced at your internship?

Our job is to find the potential companies which will be listed in the future and decide to invest a certain amount of money to help them speed-to-market. It is a challenge for me because as an analyzer, you not only need to understand data, but you also have to know quite well the industry to which your target company belongs. So for the first two weeks of the internship, I started studying the laser industry, reading numerous economic reports every week, and writing an industrial summary to my team. Thanks to the economics classes I took at Bryn Mawr, this work was not as hard as I thought.

After we got to know enough about the domestic laser industry, we started looking for some local laser companies which will be listed soon. This is a long process. Right now, our team is still working on it, and we have a list of potential companies which satisfy our requirements. Next step, our team will have a direct meeting with each company to further discuss our investment.