One last week for summer internship

This will be the last blog that I post for the summer. It’s hard to realize that my internship with Citibank is just one week from completion and new semester is about three weeks away. Looking back to the past 9 weeks with CitiMortgage in Ann Arbor, I think it’s been a really great learning experience for me and I had some really good time during summer as well. I think for this last post, it’d be a good idea to pause for a moment by looking back this summer and to reflect on new things that I learned.

I started my summer internship on the second day that I came back from holidays after travelling half dozen countries. So I was still jet legged when I was sitting in Citibank’s conference room with other 35 summer associates for the orientation week in New York. However, it was so exciting to meet and know many new friends and colleagues from other business schools around the country. People in Citibank really made us feel welcoming to the summer internship program and we are all looking forward to it. After getting back to Ann Arbor office, I was assigned to a new project, which involves interviewing and hiring new staff for an operation center in Danville, IL. The process was tiring and I spent lot of time working on this project. But the experience was valuable to me not only because of the satisfactory results that we achieved in Danville, but also because of the exposure to recruitment and coaching process. I am sure that some of great takeaways that I learned will be of help for my future career. The final highlights for the summer were the two week group project in New York with other associates. As I mentioned in my previous blog, it was a difficult and stressful assignment for us. Luckily, all team members worked very hard on this project together and senior managers made themselves accessible to the questions that we had and provided great feedbacks on our projects. Life outside of work in New York was always exciting. I went to over a dozen nice restaurants and bars with friends during the restaurant week. It had been a great dining and social experiences and we had lot of fun.

The internship is about to finish but the learning process will never end. There will be new business challenges every day. What kind of banking products shall we offer to customers to make their life easier? How can we capture more market share from competitors in US and globally? What shall we do to be a responsible lender and make profits to shareholders at the same time? As a MBA graduate and future business leader, we should keep asking ourselves those challenging questions, work harder and smarter in an increasingly competitive market so as to make companies not only survive but also thrive in the market. Good luck everyone and see you all back in Ross soon.

Group project in New York

An important part of our summer internship program at Citi is this two-week group project in New York. All associates working for different business functions in commercial banking are pre-assigned to groups of 6 to 8 people to solve a real business case, come up with recommendations and present them to senior leaders at the end. It’s essentially a five-day internal consulting project designed to evaluate our performance in leadership, business acumen and teamwork spirits. It was an intense and highly pressured project, which covers five markets in three different continents, serving over 10 million potential customers.

After this group project, my internship has only two weeks left. Apart from saying time flies, all of the interns that I met in New York, including myself are anxiously waiting to see if we will get return offers with Citibank. Therefore, every team member is working really hard together, trying to come up with some brilliant business ideas that can solve the real business cases for the bank. In earlier this week, summer interns from all business functions and all study programs were gathered at the Bank’s New York headquarter for the speech delivered by Vikrum Pandit, the CEO of Citigroup. In his speech, Mr Pandit talked about the importance of integrity in the world of finance and Citi’s transition to more transparent and responsible lending since he took the helm during the global financial crisis. The conference room was filled with over 600 summer interns, both undergraduate and graduate students from all the top business schools around the country. It was a great event in the summer.

Besides work, New York is always a great place to be in terms of social life and nice food. Talking about food, I arrived just in time for the New York restaurant week, which lasts for three weeks with about 100 participating restaurants. I went out several times with my fellow summer classmate to some nice restaurants in New York and had some really good time there. Lastly, I just hope that our team presentation in front of some very senior people in Citi goes well next week. Fingers crossed.

First impression matters

If I have an appointment with some human resource people to ask for their expert advice and skills for interview, one thing they won’t forget mentioning is that “First impression matters!” Some of them will even tell you that an experienced interviewer will know whether to hire you or not within the first 30 seconds or less. Honestly, I am always skeptical about statement like this from HRs until my very recent project experiences with CitiMortgage.

As I written previously that my project involves with interviewing and hiring new people to an operation center in Illinois. Therefore, I had this great opportunity to sit at the side of the interview table that I am not usually used to and to interview candidates. After conducted over 50 interviews over the past three weeks, I suddenly realized that HR people’s words are true. From the meet and greet moment with candidates to the time they sit down and start to talk, in most cases, both my manager and myself have about 70% of certainty of whether to hire the person or not. The rest of the interview process is about seeking information and clues to justify the decisions that we made in our minds during that first half minute. The interview experience will be extremely valuable and relevant to me for my full time interview process later this year. I experienced the importance about the first impression as an interviewer and I learned few lessons that I should definitely avoid during the interview process from mistakes that others made.

My message to my fellow Rossers, first impression matters a lot, trust me! Every effort should be made to stand you out from others at the beginning of the interviews.

In the following two weeks, I will be in New York for the group projects that involve with all the other summer interns from different business functions in the commercial banking division of Citi. So it should be very exciting and I am definitely looking forward to the group project and good social life in New York.

Project goes on

It’s hard to believe that it’s been over two weeks now since my last blog. So what’s been happening with my internship and life in Ann Arbor? There’s a lot, both at and off work. As I mentioned previously, I was heavily involved in a project, trying to set up a new operation center in Danville, IL. This new center is the product of the home affordability refinance program as part of US governments’ efforts to help home owners with their mortgage payments. Because of forecasted popularity and big increase in customers’ responses, the Bank decided to recruit more than 170 new staff in order to handle the workload. My colleague and I, however, expressed our concerns about the prospect of finding so many people locally at managers’ conference meeting because of very limited size of the talent pool. Our concerns were shared by other senior managers too. As a result of that, we decided to expand our recruiting area to Champaign, IL that is about 40 miles away from Danville. As the project’s getting bigger and more complicated, several departments, including offices in Dallas, St Louise, HR and IT are working very closely to ensure the success of the new office. I will go on a road trip again later this week to provide support and assistance needed in Danville. So how’s Danville? Some might ask. Well, we couldn’t even find a nice restaurant to spend our daily meal allowance of $70 each in town. You can imagine the rest.

Despite the challenges and pressures that I have to deal with for this project, life outside work in Ann Arbor is pretty good actually in summer. I started to play tennis in the evenings and weekends with several new friends that I met in the local tennis club. I had BBQ party with some other MBA students who also happen to be in Ann Arbor in the summer. We went to the pub to watch the Eurocup final’s match between Spain and Italy on Sunday. So my summer here has been a really good experience so far and I am really enjoyed it.

Happy July 4^th everyone and I will update you again in two weeks.

First week with Citi 200 years, done!

My first week of summer internship at Citibank was over before I had time to worry that if I am ready to go back to work after being on holiday for about two months. My first week started in New York with other 36 MBA students from some of the top business schools around the country, including Wharton, Columbia, Haas and Cornell to name a few. Everyone was so excited to get to know each other on the first day and was so happy to be part of the Citi Consumer Banking Summer Associate Program for 2012. The Bank organized some of the senior leaders from different business functions to meet and talk to us about what they do on a daily basis, the challenges they face and the opportunities ahead. With almost no time to rest for jet legs and adjust for time differences, I found the information I got in the first two days was overwhelming. However, the excitement about my summer project with CitiMortgage and the great new friends that I made have really kept me going through the week.

The last day of the week was my first day to report to CitiMortgage Ann Arbor office. During a quick catch up with my manager over a cup of coffee, he wanted me to take up a major role in facilitating the expansion of an operation center in Danville, IL. The project includes hiring new stuff and analyzing calls from a huge data base for this busy inbound call center for CitiMortgage’s super streamline business approaches. The project is challenging in its complex nature, but I am really excited about it and the opportunity to pull it off. When I was writing this blog, I am working from this office about 400 miles away from Ann Arbor and will be here for the rest of the week.

There will be lots of hard work ahead of me this summer. However, there also will be lots of activities and events that I will enjoy during weekends and time offs. I am sure that it will be a great summer.

Looking forward to my summer internship

Hi all, my name is Bin Ni and I am a Chinese New Zealander. During summer, I’ll do my internship with Citibank’s mortgage division in America. My internship is expected to be ten weeks, starting from the beginning of June.  I will spend two thirds of my time working as an associate at Citibank’s Ann Arbor office and the rest at its New York office for trainings and other corporate functions. Before came to Ross, I had worked in the commercial banking industry for over four years in Auckland, New Zealand. I love what I’ve been doing and I am really excited about this great opportunity to work for Citibank in North America. Although I am not new to the financial services industry, the regulations and systems are quite different in New Zealand and the US and I am looking forward to the new challenges and learning experiences.

Since I will be working at Citibank’s mortgage, I am expecting the majority of my work will be involved with different interest rates and payments, analyzing the current trend of the property market in America and dealing with different mortgage distribution channels for CitiMortgage’s products. I’ve met the people with whom that I will work together at that office several times, I really like the people, their team spirits and working culture, work hard and play harder!

I am currently on holidays, travelling through some South Pacific and East Asia countries before returning to the US in June for some tough, exciting and fun ten weeks at Citibank.