19 Nov Amy Li: Blackrock Solutions

In the summer of my sophomore and junior years of college, 2010-2011, I interned at R&R Consulting, where I researched and modeled Asset-Backed Security deals.

Through building excel models, I familiarized myself with the assets and liabilities accounts of ABS and MBS deals, building the defaults, principals, prepayments, interests, and recoveries accounts on the assets side and waterfall modeling accounts, short falls, remaining available funds, recovery accounts on the liabilities side. I also learned to model deals on The Waterfall Editor(c), a system used to replicate and test cash distribution waterfalls for liability cash-flow modeling. In addition, aside from training my financial modeling skills, I also sharpened my analytical and research skills through drafting case studies of interesting deals, which gave me exposure into the business insights behind the securitization process.

During the two summers at R&R Consulting, I really loved the people that I was working with and enjoyed the work I was doing. In addition, the experience gave me the modeling and analytical skills that I have utilized greatly since, and I feel tremendously lucky to be able to get a specialized experience to structured finance and the securitization process for my first internship.

In my senior year, I decided to diversify my work experiences and did full-time recruiting with BlackRock Solutions. In the Trading & Analytics group, I work with different financial applications on BlackRock’s Aladdin Platform, including Portfolio & Risk Analysis, Data Operations, and Trade Execution applications, which work together to provide a centralized system for maintaining financial data and analytics. In the future, I plan to specialize in Aladdin’s risk reporting and analytic tools, especially focusing on mortgage analytics, an interest greatly influenced by my amazing experience at R&R Consulting.