With many companies, February is the starting month of the recruiting season and the time for the prospective candidates to meet employers and show talent at career events. Vera Potekhina is in her third year of bachelor's degree at ICEF and has joined several case competitions and projects over the past month. Here’s Vera’s experience of solving companies’ real-life challenges and how connecting with employers can prompt the right career choice.
Yandex Delivery Case Championship
I learned about the Yandex Delivery Case Championship from the social networks. My friends posted the announcement and wrote they were looking for people to join their team. The idea sounded dubious to me at first as having very little to do with my chosen career field: Banking. But then I thought why not, and accepted. We were a team of students from different universities, and, to my great pleasure, I discovered there was an ICEF third-year among the organizers of that case competition. It was nice to know ICEF had contributed through her to making such an engaging event happen.
It was a one-day event and it tasked us, teams, with developing a product for Yandex Delivery’ legal entity services. There were experts and interns who gave talks to us first. It was very enriching to experience the teamwork – something that we tend to be missing out on as students. I can’t say I was able to use my hard skills the way I thought I would at that case competition, but it helped me understand I wasn’t not fit for careers in consulting. I am now a more confident job seeker.
Alfa Bank-hosted event
In December 2022, HSE hosted Alfa Bank for a three-day event dedicated to product management, one of the key services within a bank. The teams worked on the ideas for new products. Some of the people there wanted to go beyond solutions and approached the organizers with a viable project to advance financial awareness among citizens. So emerged a team of highly motivated students, including myself, and our project was given a go. And because the event was hosted by two schools in parallel – HSE and Bauman School – we had majors from different backgrounds on our team. It only made us more effective, for we were able to consider all facets and embrace a variety of options.
Our financial awareness project targets young people and is supervised by one of Alfa Bank’s product owners. The past two months kept us busy conducing a large-sample interview survey, so we now have a much clearer picture of our action plan. We are planning to have the project completed before summer. In meantime, it keeps us in touch with the product development team, introducing us to interesting personalities and increasing our own awareness of the tasks before the units within the bank.
As a future finance specialist, I benefit from this project by gaining thorough understanding of the processes involved in banking product development. The people I communicate with in this project hold unique expertise and are a valuable source of knowledge. What is more, I now have the idea of what managerial skills are required for working in such popular areas as product management and project management within a bank. As we build our own project from scratch, we get the experience as project cycle managers, which is found in case competitions only rarely. We can witness a real product emerging. It isn’t just a task that gets done and forgotten.
It was this project in cooperation with Alfa Bank that helped me to decide on banking as my future career
I realized I wanted to be in banking after my first year of study, when I started a job in the IT company CROC. I was in sales department and interacting with some of the largest banks. Now my goal is to start a sales job in the banking sector.
DOM.RF Case Championship
This past March, DOM.RF was holding a large online course that attracted more than 300 participants and had case championship as its final part. The course focused on DOM.RF, its core business, and career building. I learned about it from ICEF Career Services. It turned out there were other people in my class who had applied for it – Valeria Gvozdeva, Ekaterina Finyutina, Daria Kurmukova and Mark Hayet. So, we decided to team up for solving the final case, which was about attracting liquidity to a bank.
We managed to produce excellent analytics, impressive calculations and a truly beautiful presentation that made our solution look impeccable. We presented it in DOM.RF’s office in Moscow and were announced winners, to our great satisfaction, given how many contestants there were from different parts of Russia. Our solution was the fittest! Also, it was ingesting to meet DOM.RF’s major experts. Some of them hold degrees from ICEF.
One thing that I think has contributed most to our success was proper task distribution. We coped rather quickly and had enough time to work out the best presentation for our solution. As future analysts and financial modeling experts, we were able to perform full-depth, most detailed calculations. I could see it from comparison with other teams’ results.
Our ability to handle numerical data made the ICEF team stand out from the rest, winning us all votes from jury panel
My biggest motivation for joining case competitions is the opportunity to meet companies and find out more about the tasks they’re dealing with. Case competitions are worth dozens of internships. They are a perfect way to get to know the market situation better and are an asset to any successful resume. Employers tend to look at what you solved and where, and many will ask you to tell more. The contacts that I made through case competitions are certainly important to me – and more so because I made them in a professional environment composed of enthusiastic students, an enriching experience that often leads to more opportunities. Just recently, we were contacted by people from DOM.RF who said they had an expert who would like to hire us for an internship despite the fact that the selection was officially closed.
In April 2023, I’ll be competing in Changellenge Cup Russia as part of ICEF team. The problem we’ll be solving comes from VTB, so this is a real chance for me to try my hand at banking solutions and maybe even offer best.
