G-Research Work Experience Programme Review

During a week in the summer of 2023, I and a few other sixth form students had the opportunity to conduct a week's worth of work experience at G-Research (GR). As I was on the Software Engineering track, we were given a project to complete throughout the course of the week: based on GR's Crypto Forecasting Challenge on Kaggle, we used Pandas to visualise data on major cryptocurrencies and quantitatively measure their volatility. Although the majority of each day was spent building on the progress made on this project on the day before, we also had at least two 1-hour talks a day with our mentors ranging from possible career paths into GR to what a day in the life actually looks like for an engineer at GR. On the final day there was a networking session, where we were able to connect with the friendly staff from across the office.

Throughout the week, we were accompanied by employees who not just software engineers (i.e. we were able to talk at length with data analysts, data engineers, software engineers, recruiters, quants etc.). Quantitative finance is an often unheard of or seemingly mysterious industry, but all staff were happy to explain GR and all the different possible roles as simply as possible. The final day networking session and talks about potential career pathways and days in the life all helped with our understanding of GR and whether it's a place we'd like to work at in the future.

Though I did have somewhat substantial prior experience with Python and programming, this work experience highlighted how they could be fused with concepts from Maths and Economics to help with real-world decision making. Over the course of the week, I got familiar with the data visualisation framework Pandas to extract patterns from the large dataset of cryptocurrencies we were given. It was really satisfying to be able to apply my knowledge from A-Level Maths of things like standard deviations to work out the simple moving averages and standard deviations of all the cryptocurrencies. We then learnt how to combine the two to create Bollinger Band plots.
I really appreciated how enthusiastic staff were with getting us to improve on our code, even if it seemingly worked. The strategies I picked up on how to improve the efficiency and time complexity of my code is something I've definitely made use of in my own personal projects.
Apart from the hard skills, GR showed us that soft skills like public speaking are also very important, especially in the technical environments that GR employees work in. On the final day we had an unforgettable workshop on public speaking as well as authentic interview prep, with GR recruiters giving us all a 1-on-1 mock interview using the CV we had initially submitted.

The culture at GR is second-to-none. On the last day, I remember all of my peers on the programme feeling gutted that we couldn't stay for longer. Everyone was really helpful, kind and genuine. For me, I had initially thought GR was quite an anti-social place due to the intense and complex challenges that employees are trying to solve, but my time at GR showed me that it's the exact opposite. Everyone seemed to have a smile on their face, and loved working together on complex issues.

I enjoyed this programme to a very large extent. By far this was the most enjoyable and well organised placement I have ever attended. The effort staff put in to was very noticeable. Also, I think the idea of working at GR really grew on all my peers, including myself, as it seems like a challenging but fun and rewarding place to work at.

Yes