Break into Quant Trading from SWE?

Background:

- Current Junior Student at Ivy

 - 3 FAANG internships (2 completed, 1 upcoming this summer)

- Real Estate agent (part-time)

I've already accepted a SWE internship for this summer but I'm wondering if I got some sort of IB / Finance role lieu of a quant internship in the Fall / Spring if I would still have a chance at a quant trading role after graduation. 

6 Comments
 

Other than potentially firms that mostly hire returning interns I don't think anyone would require a finance internship for this type of role especially if you have a strong background in math and/or data science/machine learning. I don't think anything IB or real estate will help get quant roles though as they are even less relevant than software engineering. 

 
Most Helpful

I'm in my last year at college right now, and I always had SWE internships. I was going to return to a FAANG company full time as a SWE, but decided to try interviewing for trading at different prop shops/ hedge funds since I always liked math more than software development. I studied my ass off, but I got 2 offers from reputable firms, so definitely don't worry about it. Given your school, you'll probably get interviews at most places, and as long as you can do well on these interviews, you should be ok.

 

I don't want to give too much away, but the one I accepted was one of Optiver/DRW/IMC/SIG/Jump. My TC is more than 2.5 times my TC at FAANG for swe. In terms of study materials, I'd recommend doing all the problems in A practical Guide to Quantitative Finance Interviews by Xinfeng Zhou and also looking at Glassdoor for company specific problems. Also be sure to be pretty fast at mental math. I'd recommend practicing on expert level at rankyourbrain.com/mental-math.

 

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