Quant Internship

[MMF]

Hello everyone,

I'm a first year Applied Math PhD student and I just submitted my first internship application at a big bank. I already have a bachelors and a masters, both of which are in math, though leaning more towards pure rather than applied, and have a bit of coding experience though not much. I do not have much, if any, finance experience. The job listing asked for quantitative MS/PhD students but an ideal candidate to them would be a PhD student in their last 2 years. With all that said I have three questions:

1) What are the odds of me landing this internship?

2) Am I even prepared for such an internship or will they teach me what I need to know on the job?

3) Considering the application closes soon and the position doesn't start until June, when can one expect to hear back?

Thank you all.

 

[KillingField]

1) You should definitely pass rhe CV screen. Then it's just a matter of you passing the interviews. Probably coding and some financial math, stochastic calculus and the like, maybe with a few brainteasers mixed in.

As with any position, without preparation, your chances of passing the interviews are slim. There are books on quant interviews, get one and make sure you can answer questions also from the financial math bit as well as coding, and your chances are much better. Ideally you'd read through something like Baxter & Rennie as well, but if you want best return for time spent, it's the interview you need to pass and that's what you should focus on.

2) You'll learn on the job. It's beneficial for you to know more before starting, but if you can learn all the stuff to pass the interview, I'm sure you'll do fine on tbe job. You probably won't know what asset class and what projects you'll be working on before starting, so it's difficult to be well prepared anyway.

3) Depends. Interns are most likely all interviewed at the same time, with the whole process culminating to a superday. So I don't expect you to hear back before some time after the applications close. So probably in the next couple of months. May be a bit sooner, I guess, in particular if the first round is an automated coding thing or something (similat to leetcode/hackerrank/etc). Depends on the bank.

 

[Onegin]

Might count against you that you're not graduating 3-4 years; firms often use internship as a test drive for full time hires, and that's a lot of runway.

 

[Daniel Duffy]

Pure mathematics is a big area, not all of which is directly applicable to finance. These days you need to be comfortable with at least one real programming language.