Quant internship disaster

[ForumWhiner]

Hi everyone,

I am a 3rd year PhD student in Financial Engineering and so far, I have been bombing my quant internship interviews mostly due to lack of preparation. I could solve 50-70% of the puzzles/math questions and struggled in the remaining part. I got held up in my research and couldn't spend as much time in preparation as I thought I could when I made the applications. I am now contemplating to stay in school for a year more and re-apply next year for the same internships. I am wondering if firms would be willing to give candidates a second shot one year down the line. Sorry if my question sounds silly but I am just worried about the long term consequences of my current disastrous interviews.

Thanks.

 

[Daniel Duffy]

Some on the board of directors, because of this, were lobbying to remove Watson as IBM's President. He needed these inventories sold.

A very large government bid, approaching a million dollars, was on the table. The IBM Corporation—no, Thomas J. Watson Sr.—needed every deal. Unfortunately, the salesman failed. IBM lost the bid. That day, the sales rep showed up at Mr. Watson’s office. He sat down and rested an envelope with his resignation on the CEO’s desk. Without looking, Mr. Watson knew what it was. He was expecting it.

He asked, “What happened?”

The sales rep outlined every step of the deal. He highlighted where mistakes had been made and what he could have done differently. Finally he said, “Thank you, Mr. Watson, for giving me a chance to explain. I know we needed this deal. I know what it meant to us.” He rose to leave.

Tom Watson met him at the door, looked him in the eye and handed the envelope back to him saying, “Why would I accept this when I have just invested one million dollars in your education?”

 

[ForumWhiner]

Some on the board of directors, because of this, were lobbying to remove Watson as IBM's President. He needed these inventories sold.

A very large government bid, approaching a million dollars, was on the table. The IBM Corporation—no, Thomas J. Watson Sr.—needed every deal. Unfortunately, the salesman failed. IBM lost the bid. That day, the sales rep showed up at Mr. Watson’s office. He sat down and rested an envelope with his resignation on the CEO’s desk. Without looking, Mr. Watson knew what it was. He was expecting it.

He asked, “What happened?”

The sales rep outlined every step of the deal. He highlighted where mistakes had been made and what he could have done differently. Finally he said, “Thank you, Mr. Watson, for giving me a chance to explain. I know we needed this deal. I know what it meant to us.” He rose to leave.

Tom Watson met him at the door, looked him in the eye and handed the envelope back to him saying, “Why would I accept this when I have just invested one million dollars in your education?”

Thank you for the response and a nice analogy to the situation at hand. I take that as a 'your current rejections won't negatively impact future chances'. Either my interpretation is correct or I suck at verbal puzzles too!

 

[Daniel Duffy]

Can you give an example of a 'verbal puzzle', please?
IMHO your success in life is not determined solely by 'puzzles' Still, I suppose puzzles must be learned.

 

[ForumWhiner]

Bump

Any more thoughts on the original post? Now I received an email for interview at a top Quant shop and I am wondering what to do. I feel OK with math/stats puzzles after a few days of prep but weaker on algorithms and therefore underprepared. Any interview book recommendations focused on algorithms in particular? Thanks a ton.

 

[Onegin]

Yes. There's 3 of these books you need to read and know very well. Stefanica's is one of the best, google will help you find the other two "quant interview" is the keywords. For algorithms, the MIT Opencourseware lectures / book are helping me a lot.

These are kind of like the GRE - not hard, but time consuming and difficult. But they are the price of poker, and almost everyone you're competing against has these down cold.

Not for nothing, but the path to a quant internship and materials required is pretty well trodden. I'd be a little concerned if you're 3rd year PhD in a financial engineering program and didn't have the inside track on this. Maybe get your network on and talk to some of the MFE students at Baruch / CMU / NYU? I was in your same situation, and was pretty surprised to learn almost everyone in my program had already read all / most of the big three quant interview books and had worked through tons of problems on hackerrank and leetcode before we even started.

 

[QuantQuestion]

Yes. There's 3 of these books you need to read and know very well. Stefanica's is one of the best, google will help you find the other two "quant interview" is the keywords. For algorithms, the MIT Opencourseware lectures / book are helping me a lot.

These are kind of like the GRE - not hard, but time consuming and difficult. But they are the price of poker, and almost everyone you're competing against has these down cold.

Not for nothing, but the path to a quant internship and materials required is pretty well trodden. I'd be a little concerned if you're 3rd year PhD in a financial engineering program and didn't have the inside track on this. Maybe get your network on and talk to some of the MFE students at Baruch / CMU / NYU? I was in your same situation, and was pretty surprised to learn almost everyone in my program had already read all / most of the big three quant interview books and had worked through tons of problems on hackerrank and leetcode before we even started.

Are these the 3 books or would Stefanica's replace one of them?
Quant Job Interview Questions And Answers by Mark Joshi
Heard on The Street: Quantitative Questions from Wall Street Job Interviews by Timothy Crack
A Practical Guide To Quantitative Finance Interviews by Xinfeng Zhou

 

[binomial-torrent]

I would add this as the fourth, or perhaps even replacing Heard on the Street (since it's very old). This is newer, comes from actual company interview questions, and includes much more coding (rightfully).

GitHub - dwcoder/QuantitativePrimer: An Interview Primer for Quantitative Finance

An Interview Primer for Quantitative Finance. Contribute to dwcoder/QuantitativePrimer development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

 

[ForumWhiner]

Yes. There's 3 of these books you need to read and know very well. Stefanica's is one of the best, google will help you find the other two "quant interview" is the keywords. For algorithms, the MIT Opencourseware lectures / book are helping me a lot.

These are kind of like the GRE - not hard, but time consuming and difficult. But they are the price of poker, and almost everyone you're competing against has these down cold.

Not for nothing, but the path to a quant internship and materials required is pretty well trodden. I'd be a little concerned if you're 3rd year PhD in a financial engineering program and didn't have the inside track on this. Maybe get your network on and talk to some of the MFE students at Baruch / CMU / NYU? I was in your same situation, and was pretty surprised to learn almost everyone in my program had already read all / most of the big three quant interview books and had worked through tons of problems on hackerrank and leetcode before we even started.

Thanks for the response. I already read the three commonly cited books for Quant interviews (Joshi, Crack, Zhou) but I felt they were light on algorithms. Will take a look at MIT courseware and Quantitative Primer. Did you follow this course (Introduction to Algorithms) or some other?

Any inputs on how to get started on Hackerank? Just solve random problems or are there specific problems for Quant interviews?

I unfortunately couldn't gather much info from my colleagues- ours is a 5 year program jointly run with econ department where most people don't do Quant internships because they go to Academic job market or take risk management/economist jobs which require different type of interview preparation (mostly focused on research and soft skills).

 

[binomial-torrent]

The Mathematics section of HackerRank is most relevant for Quant interviews, but make sure you get all the basic algorithms concepts down as well (dynamic programming, graphs, sorting, etc.) If you're a financial engineering PhD you should be able to learn all that stuff in a week.

And yes, the Introduction to Algorithms course you linked is the one.