Hi! I’m Sahil. Through this blog, I’ll try to share my experience throughout the internship season as well as a Quantitative Trader Intern at AlphaGrep. At the time of writing this blog, I’m almost at the end of my internship, with the last few days remaining. It is a 2 months offline internship, based in Gurgaon.

Months before the internship season started:

Till my 2nd year, I had no clue of what a quant profile is and how do I get into it. I got to know about it only when one of my friends mentioned about it in a discussion about the internships. I have always had interest in the finance side, and felt that this field is one which I can maybe try to experience as it requires a mixture of your technical as well as critical thinking skills. I started my internship preparation after the end of my 2nd year. I wasn’t sure of what the preparation for different profile looks like andIt was a bit challenging to think about appropriate resources and start practising coding regularly, as I had not done much of coding, apart from those required in few of the courses. But, I had heard from many seniors that coding and DSA is a very basic requirement for almost all the profiles in the internship. So to begin with, I started solving questions from cses.fi to get a sense of the basic problems and their different categories. After having solved some simple ones, I moved to leetcode to start practising DSA questions. I used to solve 2-3 problems everyday at max, but tried to be consistent enough. In the last one month, I also looked upon the internet and started solving puzzle and probability questions from sites such as brainstellar.

The Internship Season:

It was almost the mid of July when the final resume was needed to be submitted to and verified by the PT cell. Just after the resume verification deadline, IAFs for different companies started opening and I tried applying for all of them, as I wasn’t very sure of getting a profile of my choice and wanted to keep my doors open for any opportunity that I may get. In the back of my mind, it was also that the more companies I apply for, the more tests I get to give, adding more value to my internship preparation. The initial two weeks were quite hectic with tests and classes back to back, that too on all days of the week. It was quite overwhelming initially, but I somehow managed to get through it. I got shortlisted for the interview with few firms like Optiver, Samsung Korea and Morgan Stanley, but I wasn’t able to get into their final selection list. Eventually, I got interviewed and selected by AlphaGrep, exactly the profile that I wished to go into!

The test and the interview:

The test for AlphaGrep consisted of 5 coding questions, which was done to be using only C++ and no other programming language was allowed. Due to this fact, some of my friends who had prepared using other languages, faced difficulties and missed qualifying for the next round. The interview consisted of two rounds, both of them being the technical round. In the first round, I was asked to explain some of the projects that I had mentioned on my resume. It also consisted of some basic DSA questions and few other general algorithm-based questions. The second round was focused more on problem-solving, and consisted mainly of puzzles and probability-based questions, except a single coding problem. The interviewers were very nice and frank, and made me comfortable in case I wasn’t able to answer properly.

My work profile:

I’m working as a Quantitative Trader Intern in a mid-frequency trading (MFT) team. Being in a MFT, not much of my coding skills is put into use as my work mainly revolves around making alphas or in simple words, making trading strategies or finding some factors to select appropriate stocks for trading in the equities market.

Apart from this, I also received other tasks related to coding some models and reading about few topics for my own understanding. These things helped me get a broader overview of how various instruments are traded across the exchanges all over the world and how the strategies and models need to be updated timely to match the pace with this fast-evolving market.

I have had a prior knowledge of financial markets, which definitely helped me get comfortable with this field easily. But even if one doesn’t has this knowledge apriori, one can learn it along the way while doing the internship.

Conclusion:

It is a highly competitive and challenging field. As it involves thinking about various market scenarios and trying several different strategies, one may not get results immediately and may have to try plenty of things before striking a successful strategy, which might be demotivating sometimes. Overall, I would say this field is quite intriguing and definitely one must give a shot to it. In the end, I would like to thank you for being with me till the end of this (lengthy!) blog and wish you all the best for your future endeavors!