Developing for Alliance Bernstein
LCM's Moshe Losev Spent Two Months at Asset Management Firm
What’s it like to work at one of New York’s premier asset management firms? Ask Lander College for Men student Moshe Losev. This past summer, Losev was a software development intern with Alliance Bernstein in New York City.
Losev’s responsibility was to launch phase one of a time tracking/project management application that allowed developers to allocate the time that they would spend on team projects. “The purpose of this application was to create a transparency between the developers and the business side,” Losev explained. “We wanted the business to know how money and time is allocated to specific projects. All of the interns were told in the beginning of the internship that we wouldn’t be working on pet-projects; that we were in the company for ten weeks and were going to be doing real things which would have a long-term impact on the company.”
The program was originally in Microsoft Access and Losev was responsible for making the project a robust web application. Losev explained that by making the program web-based, it would be scalable company-wide, extendable and more user-friendly
“Access is a database and it’s not meant to be used as a large-scale application and they wanted something that could be used as an enterprise software,” explained Losev. “I was involved in the development in the front-end, the API layer, and the backend.”
(For those not familiar with technical jargon: the front-end of a program is what the user sees; the back-end is where the data is stored, and the API is the middleman that connects the two.)
The front-end was developed using the java script framework Angular, the middleware was developed with C# and Mass Transit and the back-end was SQL server.
“I was definitely prepared because of my courses,” said Losev. “I want to give a special shout-out to Professor Robinson. He’s one of the most talented professors I ever had. Not only did he help familiarize me with the technologies of the job, but he always integrated what he was talking about in lectures with real-life software development practices. Walking into the internship, I was pretty familiar with most of the technology stack that they were using. The learning curve was much smaller than it could have been.”
Losev found out about the internship from an email sent by Robert Grosberg, career services director at Touro’s Graduate School of Technology. “I was the only person from Touro at the info session about the internship; most of the other students were from the Ivy League schools,” recalled Losev. “I networked with the managers and sent my follow-up emails.”
His persistence paid off and after a phone interview, Losev was invited to the corporate headquarters for two rounds of interviews. Losev was one of four technology interns that the company hired. (He was the only non-Ivy League intern in the group—in addition, two of the four interns were graduate students). Losev delivered a final well-received presentation with his coworker at the end of the internship.
“I loved it,” said Losev about his time with Alliance Bernstein. “It was a great learning experience. I got to use a lot of technology that I wasn’t familiar with. I met a lot of developers that gave me guidance and I learned a little bit about finance.”
