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Ken
Corporate Title: AnalystBusiness Area: Information Technology, Business Analysis/Engineering
Year Joined Credit Suisse: 2005
Journal Entries Welcome to My Credit Suisse Journal! 23 August 2007 Hi everyone out there interested in Credit Suisse (CS), IT or looking for a read. Welcome to my first journal entry. I’m a recent graduate (July 2006) working here at CS as part of the Technical Associate (TA) Program. You might have noticed the two abbreviations- well let’s just say there are a lot of those here at CS but more on that some other time. My current role is an IT Business Analyst (BA) in the Fixed Income Department. The application I support is called ARC and is used across the bank for trade tracking and reporting. I haven’t always been a BA though; I started here at CS as a developer, and then moved onto project management. After project management I transitioned onto a business analyst role, and have been here ever since. During my time here I have helped manage projects, helped to launch a new front to back website/portal for a brand new business in the bank and I’m currently working on getting the ARC system updated/enhanced/tested (in that order). As a TA I also participated in events (philanthropic/social/sporting), presented a researched topic to upper management (which took some time from work but was rewarding) and do this journal! I’ll be updating this journal about two times a month (maybe more if work allows) and I hope it can be a funny/insightful/interesting read for you. Vacation! 14 September 2007 Hi! I was going to write this entry as a “day in the life of” entry but I’m on vacation at the moment, so a day in the life of someone on vacation would consist of eating and a sharp increase in the amount of sleeping. I will however write about some of the different aspects of my job as a Business Analyst (BA) in IT (which may help you catch up on some sleep of your own). So what does an IT Business Analyst do? Well most importantly, a BA finds out what the business wants! Sounds simple, right? Well sometimes it is, sometimes it’s not. You have to not only be able to identify what the business wants, but also be able to identify whether or not the system is capable of it, the latter part being where most of the analysis part of the job comes into play. The work itself can be demanding, but it’s helped by the fact that the people I work with are awesome. My manager is very smart and understanding, and the work is varied enough so there is always something new to do or to analyze for our system. This variety helps me to do a better job as an analyst because of the exposure to the different aspects of the system. Right now I’m working on an analysis of a new email confirmation update, setting up testing scenarios for the rewrite of our entire system, adding new logic to deal with Emerging Market Trade Splits (which are really just trades split between two people), and processing trade data that needs to be added to our database. After most of the analysis is done on a project and the requirements are captured, the business users sign off on the document and it is sent to our developers in Singapore (which sometimes means late nights talking to them, but not too often). This week we had the second game of our bowling league, sponsored by our local IT Sports and Social Club. (I think there are similar events in other offices). My team, representing the 2006 Technical Associates (TAs), is currently 5th out of 16 teams - our only loss was to our fellow 2007 TAs (they will probably never let us live that down)! At the end of this tournament the top team gets to play Tom Sanzone and his team (if you don’t know who Tom Sanzone is, please read up just in case it comes up!). Cheers. Events 22 September 2007 Along with our day to day work here at Credit Suisse, we also have the chance to participate in activities, events and speaker series. For Technical Associates (TAs), we get to attend most of the events held at the Company (excluding those for specific departments) and we get to plan our own activities through our TA Committee - a committee comprised of members of our TA class. In the past year, the TAs were able to take part in quite a few TA Committee events: we went to see 300 movies at the IMAX theatre, had a pot luck dinner during the holidays (food from around the world -awesome!), went bowling (which turned into dinner since someone forgot to book lanes for the attendees), participated in some philanthropic events, had a fishing trip and also went to see Avenue Q on Broadway (hilarious note to everyone: “Bad Idea Bears” is the best idea in a play, ever). This year, after a recent TA election, I get to be on the Committee and help plan the events. We (myself and the other members of the Committee) have some ideas floating around about what we want to do, but the current TA class has been little help - no everyone, we cannot go to Puerto Rico on the HR budget. Some events that we hope to do are laser tag, paintball, a few special lunches and maybe a couple of after work get-togethers. Hopefully these events will give the current TA classes an opportunity to get to know each other better. Also of note is that we have our annual NY IT Expo coming up in October. This is an event for all of IT where each division/group shows what they have been working on. I’m in charge of my group’s booth so hopefully we can pull something off that’s fairly cool this year. The best part of the expo is that most of the booths give away prizes if you listen to what they have to say and enter the raffle/survey/questionnaire that follows their presentations. Prizes awarded last year included wine, tickets to events, Ipod Videos, Ipod Nanos, Playstation 2s (PS3 wasn’t out yet), Xbox 360s, and probably the best prize at the event, a $1,000+ snowboard that was totally sick looking! Anyway, until next time. Cheers. How to Sell Yourself to a Prospective Employer 20 December 2007 Hi, It’s now the season when everyone is either applying or has applied for a part-time or full time position for the coming year. I can’t help but remember some advice I was given during my years in college. During one of my classes, Engineering and Entrepreneurship, a speaker came in to help us to sell ourselves to future employers. His first piece of advice was to spend that extra bit of time to prepare the cover letter and resume. These should be tailored to the specific position to which you are applying. There are many tutorials online or available through school for resume writing so I won’t focus on that point. Instead, I want to focus on what the speaker focused on: the actual interview process and questions. He broke down the types of questions that you might be asked and how to address them. Questions fell into a certain number of categories and only certain types of questions were asked. I choose three categories and three types of questions- more can be chosen if they fit the situation. Categories: - Work - Personal - Ability Types of questions: - Difficult position - Greatest Achievement - Collaboration So here it is- a 3x3 matrix of situations, which will prepare you with powerful answers to 9 questions that the interviewer can ask you. Have a story ready for each of these items and you’ll be able to produce them when needed. The more time you prepare your answers, the better prepared you’ll appear to the interviewer. Example question: What difficult position have you ever been in with a colleague at work and how was it resolved? Story: I once worked on a project with a colleague that was opposed to my proposed solution to an issue…etc. Final thought that comes to mind is to know the company you’re interviewing for. Many times I have seen classmates send out resumes/CV’s to too many companies at once. When the classmates received a reply, they couldn’t keep track of what each company actually did. This did not look favorably on them from an interviewer’s perspective and they didn’t get the positions. After all this, sit back and enjoy the offers that will come in! (Or read the other journal author’s perspectives on selling yourself to a prospective employer). Cheers and good luck!
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