MDI Prep Team

PSP Series
[Preparation for Summer Placements]
General Questions
Instructions:

You are required to consult your mentors for improving the quality of

answers
The soft copy of your initial draft is to be mailed to your mentors with

prepteam@mandevian.comin cc by EOD 15 July 2015

The soft copy of the complete documentis to be mailed
atprepteam@mandevian.comwithplacecom@mdi.ac.inin cc for

finalsubmission
o File naming convention : <RollNo>_<Name>_PSP-01
o Mail subject line
: <RollNo>_<Name>_PSP-01
One Hard copy of only this page signed by the mentors shall be

submittedat the pigeon box outside Placement Office

Deadline for final submissions (soft copy & hard copy): EOD 18 July

2015
Font: Candara | Font size: 12 | Line Spacing: 1.5
Spaces provided for the answers are only indicative
All the questions are mandatory

Name
Roll No.

:DEVESH AGGARWAL
:15P198

Sign:
Name:

Sign:
Name:

Mentor 1

Mentor 2

MDI Prep Team

Question 1:
Tell me something about yourself.
Hi, my name is Devesh, I am a graduate from BITS Pilani. I am interested in
the field of finance, specifically risk & portfolio management. I have cleared
both levels of Financial Risk Manger examinations conducted by GARP, and
recently gave Level 2 of Chartered Financial Analyst examination conducted
by CFAI.
Prior to joining MDI, I have worked in two industries namely business
consulting and internet start-ups. My most recent employment was with
Manthan Advisors as an EA to the CEO, this was a short 3 month stint. Before
Manthan I worked for 18 months with MEC Consulting which was a partof
Quartz+Co, one of the top Scandinavian strategy consulting firms. As an
analyst at MEC, I worked with clients such as DONG Energy, Gazprom, &
Hilding Anders. My primary job responsibility as an analyst was assisting
management consultants and partners in collecting &analysing industry
related information to find strategic insights that solve the clients business
problems. During my college days and my internships I have been a part of
Framebench Technologies, A BITSian technology startup as one of the first
employees. I wore multiple hats as front-end developer, business developer
and recruiter. My efforts helped the company bag a spot in IIM-Ahmedabads
iAccelerator incubation program and raise venture capital funding.
I love playing tennis and was the lawn tennis team captain of BITS Pilani for
year 2011, my team had won various inter-collegiate tournaments. I like to
read a lot, specifically non-fiction.

MDI Prep Team

Question 2:
Mention 3 strengths. State one instance associated with each.
I would like to think that my strengths are:
-

Highly adaptive: I have worked for multiple companies and successfully

delivered projects to clients in multiple industries ranging from
technology startups, to oil & gas, maritime andclean-tech. Each time I
have had to understand a completely new industry in a very short time
to meet client expectations.

Fast learner: I have written code and created business models for a
technology startup, worked on procurement strategies for a Danish
utility and analysed market entry strategies for a Swedish retailer.
Therefore, on multiple instances I have been proverbially, thrown at
the deep end of the pool and I have strived hard to successfully swim
through and meet my clients and employers expectations.

Tenacious: Once I decide on a goal, I keep at it until I achieve it. I lined

up and cleared four of the most competitive examinations namely
GMAT, CAT, FRM and CFA one after the other within a period of four
months.

MDI Prep Team

Question 3:
Mention 3 weaknesses. State how you plan to work on each of those
weaknesses.
- Time management: I am constantly striving hard to manage my schedule
even better using online tools and services
- Delegation & trust: I am quite finicky about the quality of the work I
produce and often times end up taking more on my plate than trusting
others, creating time-crunch for me. I need to learn the art of delegation and
employee motivation
- Multi-tasking: I like to finish and produce one project/task at hand in an
excellent fashion, rather than taking on multiple activities at the same time. I
am learning to better manage multiple projects and activities here at MDI

MDI Prep Team

Question 4:
What are your short term (3-5 years) and long term goals (10-15 years)?
Short term to become knowledgeable enough in the field of derivatives and
risk management to understand the work of pioneers and the industry
leaders. I aim to build my knowledge base so that I can successfully replicate
strategies and innovations in my personal portfolio. I will try to work hard
towards building skill sets to create varied portfolio management strategies
depending on the global macro environment scenarios
Long-term I hope that Ill be able to successfully launch and run my own
fund one day and to become one of the top risk managers in the APAC
region. Apart from capital markets, I hope that Ill also become a serious
angel investor and prove to be a successful mentor to some of the best
companies in the world

MDI Prep Team

Question 5:
Give an instance when you stepped in, took charge, mustered support &
influenced the outcome of a project by taking on a leadership role.
During my penultimate year at BITS Pilani, I was chosen to be the lawn
tennis team captain. It was an especially challenging responsibility to take on
because; our team had lost all the tournaments in the previous year and was
low on morale, most of the senior players were graduating which meant
majority of the team was young and had no match experience, we had no
fitness or tennis coach and our first tournament was only a month away.
Since most of the team was young and inexperienced I had to don multiple
hats of a coach, captain, and a mentor while simultaneously improving my
game. I employed multiple strategies to achieve my goal of building a strong
team, some were for improving teams fitness I searched and found
bodybuilders and athletes on campus who were passionate about tennis and
gave them a spot on the team to improve their game in exchange for
training the team to reach peak fitness levels. For tennis coaching, I created
multiple schedules throughout the day for individual and team training, and
provided them with the best instructional videos I could obtain to improve
upon their specific weakness. To build team morale, I created weekly rewards
based tournaments. These tactics helped me create a healthy competitive
spirit and build team confidence.
Overcoming these challenges and leading the team to victory while
managing a challenging course load was probably one of the biggest
personal transformation phases in my life. It taught me important lessons in
leadership, teamwork & time management.

MDI Prep Team

Question 6:
What has been your greatest achievement? Justify.
I would like to think one of my greatest achievements was creating a product
that was used by a lot of people. During my internship with Framebench, I
created a facebook game called Gossipville, which simulated the real life
struggle to become a celebrity in the virtual world. It was special for me
because, I am a civil engineer by education and had never coded before.
Therefore to learn something from scratch and to create a tangible product
played by over 500 people was something that was truly special and my
greatest achievement as it taught me everything I know about business.

MDI Prep Team

Question 7:
What decisions have you most regretted? Why?
I regret the delays caused by the paths I have taken to move towards my
true goals and objectives. There were a lot of ways in which I could have
sped up on my growth curve and shortened the gap towards my goals. For
example had I realized my interest in the field of finance early on I could
have devoted all my energies and focus towards it since the beginning and
instead of doing engineering in unrelated subjects or working in multiple
industries, I could have studied subjects pertinent to finance and worked for
banks. But I believe that knowledge never goes to waste and that by having
studied or worked in unrelated industries, I have developed a broader
perspective and inter-relations between various functions and industries that
people working in purely financial domain wont have.

MDI Prep Team

Question 8:
Tell us about a situation when you faced an ethical dilemma and how you
overcame it?
I believe in fair play and that merit and skills weigh more in the long term
than using unethical means to achieve victory or short term gains. During my
first year at college there was a course called Workshop Practice which used
to have a surprise tests every couple of weeks. Since the course was about
machines and their usage, some people used to form groups and study some
machine parts each and then use unfair means during exam environment to
exchange information with each other to maximize their scores in the test.
Despite not getting good marks in such tests because of increase in class
average due to such practices, I never accepted invitations to join such
groups, because I believed that scoring lesser with a little knowledge is
better than acing the exam with no knowledge. Soon the teachers too
became aware of such practices and devised ingenious ways to catch such
groups and stop such practices.

MDI Prep Team

Question 9:
Why Finance/Marketing/Consulting/HR/Operations/IT? (Answer according to
your first preference of specialization)
I am passionate about finance, because I believe good financial knowledge is
one of the pre-requisites towards attaining financial independence. Plus
financial services industry works at the bleeding edge of technology and
innovation as there are a lot of personal and financial motivations involved.
For example everything that has become common-place now such as big
data analytics, digital strategies, cloud computing and say startup financing
boom trickled down from the fields of quantitative portfolio management,
adverse selection mitigation in insurance, algo-trading and capital structure
innovations.

MDI Prep Team

Question 10:
What are your key interests? What have you done till now to pursue them?
(Describe instances)
I really want to understand derivatives markets to truly be able to hedge any
situation that the markets present. I have been trading on my demat
account, trying to manage an equity and mutual fund portfolio with loss
mitigation from index hedging. I try to read a lot of research papers and
books pertaining to this field, and follow up on the updates, management
letters and ideas of top fund managers such as Ray Dalio, Warren Buffett,
Ken Griffin.
Apart from derivatives market, I yearn to learn Japanese and to be able to
play violin. I listen to Japanese learning audiobooks and watch instruction
videos during my free time, and take personalized coaching whenever
necessary.