Goldman Sachs Hosts First Engineering Essentials Program for Aspiring Software Engineers

25 MAY 2017

Fifty-two college sophomores recently joined Goldman Sachs engineers for four days of hands-on workshops on topics ranging from full-stack application development – the process of creating an application from start to finish  to career advice and presentation skills. “Developing an application is only half the battle,” noted Jessica, an associate in the Technology Division and one of the event organizers. “The other half is the ability to sell it or convince other people to use it.”

The onsite program, which took place from May 15 to 18 at the 30 Hudson Street office, aims to help augment the knowledge that college sophomores are gaining through their studies to include the enterprise application development process, offering students a greater variety of skills and knowledge in order to maximize future internship opportunities. “Many college sophomores have only taken introductory computer engineering courses that cover one or two languages, so we aim to give them a crash course in the entire application stack,” said Jessica.  

The Engineering Essentials curriculum was designed from the ground up at the firm with the aim of teaching technical skills that form the basic building blocks of any software developer. These included UML and BPMN modelling, services frameworks such as RESTful Services, HTTP, Java and APIs, as well as building user interfaces. “In order to be a successful developer, you need to understand how to build and interact with services that handle all of the main portions of an application like providing or storing data,” said Carla, an associate in the Technology Division and organizer of the program. “You need to model what you are developing and have a clear roadmap of what you will be implementing.” It was the first time that most of the students were building a full stack application and many learned at least one new language or framework as part of the process. 

Students were then given the chance to apply their newly-acquired technical skills to a final project where they were tasked with creating a full stack stock visualization web application. This involved the development of services to provide company and stock data, designing and building a user interface and using GitHub to share code with the open source community. 

At the end of the development phase, students were given the opportunity to hone their presentation skills by pitching their final solutions to Goldman Sachs engineers. 

As part of the program, students were also given first-hand insight into the types of projects Goldman Sachs engineers work on, such as SecDB, Slang, Marcus by Goldman Sachs and Marquee, as well as career advice from junior engineers at the firm.