Campus Recruiting
Intern Spotlight - Information Technology
Information Technology supports the firm through a variety of strategic solutions that offer greater business efficiency, ensure data security and privacy, and support new business opportunities. Positions run the gamut from software engineers to project managers, analysts and more.
Joseph Hoffman, University of Florida
Can you walk me through your different day-to-day tasks?
I support the Investor Access (IA) and Trade Corrections teams as a business analyst. Every day I act as the scrum master for the IA daily scrum calls and attend any sprint planning or review meetings. Some of the projects that I have worked on are documenting the digital advice enrollment flow, product catalog integration and writing tech specs documents.
Describe what the Digital Advance Enrollment Flow entails.
For documenting the Digital Advice Enrollment Flow, I created a detailed, step-by-step process documenting the various different avenues for prospects and clients to go through in the enrollment process. That entailed showing what is happening on the front-end and back-end for each avenue throughout the process, which helps bring clarity to support developers.
Steven Centeno, Florida State University
Tell me about a recent project you have taken on.
Our intern group was tasked with creating a real-time notification system for COE (Consolidated Order Entry). Our notification system uses long polling to receive messages from the server whenever a trade is executed. We are hopeful that Raymond James will find our work to be useful and that some piece of it will be taken in-house, improved and eventually implemented.
How has this internship program helped you develop and ultimately cultivate your personal and professional development?
By paying close attention to my supervisors and coworkers, I have learned how to communicate effectively with management, the right way to ask for help, time management skills, how to stay focused after a long day and numerous ways that I can improve my work ethic. Quality over quantity has been my motto since I started working over four years ago, and keeping that simple phrase in mind has always helped me deliver top-notch work to my managers.
James Hamil, University of Virginia
What made you want to pursue another IT internship here? How does this summer compare to your last one?
I really enjoyed last summer, especially the people that I met here. The work was always stimulating, and I learned so much about the industry. I wanted to further my skills in the finance-tech world as well, and Raymond James was a good place to do that. This summer is awesome too! I have more responsibilities this summer, and my work is more directly shown in the products.
What is your favorite aspect of IT? Why?
The freedom to solve problems how I want. I could use the same old methods I’m used to, or learn new skills to optimize what I’m doing. Both ways work, but I get to choose my preference most times.
Crystal Li, Georgia Institute of Technology
Can you describe the Enterprise Services project you are working on now?
Our team creates and maintains the services that serve as the glue between the database and the front-end applications. As the firm grows, measures need to be taken to ensure these services can handle increasingly heavy traffic. That being said, caches have been added to many of the services to decrease the time it takes the service to send data to the front-end when requested. This is only helpful if the caches are fresh (the data in them matches the data in the database). Our project was to build an application that can be used to assess the cache freshness of various services. It was an amazing experience that we got a chance to work on a large scale problem that requires a lot of iteration and abstraction, an opportunity that wouldn’t be available if we were just doing a side project at home or school.
What has been your favorite part of the internship?
My favorite part of the internship so far has been interacting with the other interns. I’ve met some really inspiring people who have not only taught me so many invaluable lessons, but also have become mentors.