Hi guys, i kindly request you to please give you valuable suggestions / feedback, thanks.
Throughout my professional career, I have experienced the work in bank IT industry from several different perspectives - commercial banks, investment banks, developed areas and the undeveloped. Each of these opportunities has enabled me to build upon my transactional skills and develop a strong background of system management. After almost five years of system-related experience, constantly in Hong Kong and Beijing, I observed the gap of the systematic IT online services between the two areas, and that is what I want to contribute. In the long run, I desire to establish my own company, a profitable, international, flexible and leading one in its industry, and aspire to design a sustainable system for banks. To fulfill such goals, my short-run objectives are to continue working in financial industry as a project manager, to gain richer project management experiences and stronger problem solving ability.
In my career path, the 12-month Work-Study Program in Hong Kong HSBC during my 3rd grade in the Chinese University of Hong Kong was the first turning point, because it made me really get touch with the Bank IT industry. During this year, I gained substantial industrial working experience and effected a parallel development between theoretical study and hands-on abilities. Also by assisting seniors, I saw the significant role of programming plays in system management in the real world. Therefore, in my Final Year Project, I decided to challenge my coding skills by involving in developing an interaction website, which required proficiency not only in programming languages such as Flex, Action script but also a variety of programming models. This one year devotion extremely improved my programming skills and provided a solid foundation for my later work in Societe Generale (SG) Commercial Investment Bank IT department.
Joining SG Hong Kong is the second turning point in my career path, and a significant choice to continue my passion in banking IT. My SG life was alternately frustrating and enrapturing, but educational always. SG witnessed my improvement and benefited my future career and the final goal as a whole.
Cross-cultural communication skill was the first thing that I improved in SG. The team that I was in took charge of all supporting services in Asia, including Hong Kong, China, Japan, Korea, India, Singapore and Australia. Sometime I could not understand other colleagues' accent or their way of thinking. Therefore, the main problem I had to deal with was to integrate myself with the working environment. To turn the table, as the youngest member in the team, I showed my keen interest in understanding other cultures, spent almost all my spare time together with colleagues, and befriended peers from various backgrounds. Within two months, I got obvious progress: peers and I could exchange opinions effectively and even creative ideas sparkled between our different perspectives. At that point of time, I became truly involved as part of the IT department.
Nevertheless, as an engineer, technical problem is the focus of my work all the time, and in SG supported by my good coding skills, I had performed outstandingly on a bunch of programming projects. All of them were enthralling and demanding, but they had never been boring. I got lots of fun by developing different models and integrated them with our control platform, then taking considerate maintaining of them. My immense passion for coding and modeling never faded away. In the case of Remote Ilo Access (RIA), although Ilo API adopt a special language only used for HP server hardware setup, I still managed to embed it with VBS, Bash, Perl and Html. Through the codes, I was able to control HP servers remotely even when OS is already crashed or authentication is out of control.
Then in the winter of 2012, to earn an intensive comprehension about the banking IT in some undeveloped area, I transferred my job from Hong Kong to Beijing Office, and I regard this decision as another turning point for career development. As an experienced engineer, I got the privilege to join the major projects as a core member when I just arrived, and the Hermes project, transferring email from Lotus to Outlook, was the first one. The old Lotus email system was using IBM own users and groups categories so that it was hard to maintain. Based on the experience gained from Hong Kong email infrastructure, I assisted to embed the email system with Windows Active Directory, making the new Outlook email system efficient and secure. Thanks to this 3-month project, with my diligence and teamwork spirit, I won full trust from other peers and performed more work as a group leader gradually.
Also in Beijing Office, I was seconded to the project manager in the Firmware Upgrade Project for 3 months. After pre-tests, the project went well at beginning. But later I encountered a problem that some Tibco applications had conflicts with upgrading packages, and that led to changes of server environment setting. To catch up with my original schedule, I immediately froze the on-going operations and contacted business line. After negotiation, we managed new downtimes for non-Tibco servers first and gained the time for us to fix the conflicts and recovered the broken servers. Though this project, I realized the importance of fast response during a project. Also, good planning and effective communication may convenient you a lot when some unpredicted factors come.
Obviously, my past work experiences have prepared me with the practical known-how and personal qualifications to prosper in this field. Nonetheless, I must gain more exposure to strategic management and advanced technical skills to accomplish my career goals. In the CMU 16-month track, course "Decision Making under Uncertainty" attracts me the most. As the bank IT is a huge area, specialists need to design an optional structure without the full picture. The course is providing quantitative methods for making practical decisions under uncertainty and is very helpful in my future. Also CMU require 5 courses from technology management and 4 courses from organization Strategy, this ratio matches my goal perfectly that I can amend my weak points in technical side while improving leadership and effective implementing ability. Moreover, with the 16 CMU months, I will make good use all the resources in and out of campus, getting in touch with some private investors and business partners, to accumulate capital as well as talents for my own IT consulting company.
If I have the honor to learn in CMU, certainly I can contribute to the university as well. With almost 5 years bank IT experiences, I have developed a basic understanding of how information management benefits the enterprise such as the good design of the trader ordering system, effectiveness of the email platform and data security and I will feel pleased if I have the honor to share it within the classroom.
