Bloomberg Flashcards
- Tell me about yourself.
Right now, I am a graduate student in Business Analytics at the University of Rochester. I got my bachelor’s in math and finance at Northeastern University.
I also have three years of full-time work experience as a financial analyst in the food manufacturing and legal service industries. I gained extensive experience in financial modeling, product management, data analysis, and market research. All my education and job experience helped me develop strong analytical thinking, attention to detail, and professional communication skills.
I see myself as a proactive and detail-oriented person. I am excited about this intern position at Bloomberg where I can bring my knowledge, skills, and commitment to the team.
- What is your understanding of the role, and why are you interested in this position?
As a global data intern, our responsibility is to support the Bloomberg terminal and provide the most real-time, accurate, and transparent data with valuable insights for our clients. I applied for this position because my future career goal is to become a data analyst. Throughout my education, I have built a solid foundation in mathematical finance, stats, and data analytics. Besides, I have advanced my programming skillset, including SQL, R, and Python. And I could deal with large complex data sets by data querying and data visualization.
I have excellent attention to detail during my work, and I am a strong communicator and can be relied upon to deliver data-related tasks on time. I think my career aspiration is aligned with our company’s mission, which is to deliver data-driven information through innovative technology and provide decision support to our clients.
- Tell me an area of the financial industry that you are passionate about and why?
Since I have work experience in product manufacturing and service companies, I have gained a huge interest in the commodity market. I think the commodity market is an important sector in the future with the most development opportunities.
With the growth of the population and the development of science and technology, the demand for various products is increasing, and the quality requirements for products are also getting higher and higher. So we must advance the commodity market to keep pace with technological change and satisfy our consumer’s needs.
I hope to work with the Global Data team to help the development of our products and provide decision support and the best service to our clients.
- Give an example of project you have worked on which involved a large amount of data. What was the objective of the project and how did you execute on it?
Last semester, our team analyzed a conjoint experiment conducted for a toy horse company and helped them determine new product designs with maximum profitability.
The biggest challenge we have was understanding our consumer preferences.
We had the conjoint study data from 500 individuals based on four main attributes of toy horses. After going through basic data cleaning, we first determined the utilities of attributes to assess our consumer preferences. We then conducted benefit segmentation using cluster analysis in R to identify the ideal product for each category. After that, we determined the most desirable designs and did market simulations in Python on different scenarios to find the best product line strategy. In the end, we finalized our results and presented recommendations to the company.
- Which programming language or statistical/technical software are you competent with? Give an example of a time you have used this in practice
I am an expert in SQL. In our recent project, we got a sales database with more than 2000 rows from a freight company. We needed to design a data warehouse and present insights to senior management using data visualization to help them make decisions.
The database contains 11 complex transactional data related to the company’s operations. I first performed data cleaning and reformatting. Then I applied the ETL process to extract the data from different source systems, transform it with relevant aggregate statistics, and finally load it into the data warehouse. Based on that, I created eight visualizations with required queries and integrated them into one dashboard. The dashboard displays valuable insights about the company’s business performance. For example, it can help the manager evaluate each employee’s contribution or decide which areas to target in the future.
- Add any further comments you have (2 min).
During my previous job at Ri Wang Food Group, I worked as a financial analyst and focused on analyzing the market trend and conducting product pricing models.
The company used to have only one wholesale pricing model for each product line, but there are two problems: 1. Demands of products are very seasonal, for example, some products sell a lot in fall & winter, but sales drop sharply during spring & summer. 2. Prices shouldn’t be the same for small retailers or restaurants.
So, I first did research about our competitors’ pricing scheme, and did customer surveys to find our customer preferences and their willing-to-pay price. Then I performed a market segmentation analysis to define the best product lines for each segment. After that, I came up with dynamic pricing model for each product line and partnered with the marketing team to utilize strategies including promotions and coupons to improve sales. As a result, I helped the company increased its quarterly revenue by an average of 15%.
This experience shows my ability to analyze and innovate. I hope to work with the Global Data team to deliver valuable insights to our clients and support their decision-making.
