The More You Know #5: Quant

Internship preparation journey of Varun Tokas, Y21, who is pursuing a B.Tech in Computer Science and Engineering at IIT Kanpur and is currently working as a quant research intern for NK Securities Research .

I am Varun Tokas, pursuing my B.Tech in CSE and currently doing a quant research intern at NK Securities Research. My domain of interest includes SDE and Quant . You can find an overview of my internship journey and if you are reading it I hope it could help you in some means.

My Preparation Journey:

I was in a bit of a quandry on how I should prepare for my internships. On one hand I wanted to stay in college, and perhaps do a project in the meantime, while on the other I wanted to go home for the summers, as summers in Kanpur get quite hot, maybe do an online intern somewhere, swim in the afternoons, and prepare in a more relaxed environment. After much deliberation and discussing with seniors, I ultimately decided to go home for the summers.

Wanting to prepare for Quant and Software roles, I had to primarily prepare for programming (which will form the bulk of preparation for anyone looking to work in the tech sector), and probability/puzzles (a vital part of Quant preparation). Apart from my intern preparation, I would be splitting my time between a ML Engineer internship at mSense, and swimming during the afternoons. Having done a lot of CP during my first and second year of college, I did not focus particularly on doing Competititve Programming (eg on Codeforces or Atcoder), and instead decided to devote my time to completing every question on InterviewBit. I decided to do this since it would better prepare me for actual OA questions, and kinds of questions that tended to be asked during interviews. InterviewBit is a very good, if somewhat inconsistent (and wrong) resource at times, and I would fully recommend it to anyone looking to get start in learning DSA from scratch, since it offers a roadmap on how to practice topics. I completed almost every question in every subtopic as I went through the website. I spent multiple hours every day doing the questions, and would give contests on Codeforces whenever they came up. For anyone new to DSA and competitive programming in general, I would recommend that they proceed on working on both core CP (through upsolving and going through the problemset on Codeforces), and more interview-specific problems (through InterviewBit or Leetcode). I suggest that everyone do all the questions, if only to improve their typing speed, or judging how fast they can convert their ideas into working code, as this is very important in actual OAs, where time is precious. It is very easily to focus on a particular problem that you know how to solve but keep making small errors in coding out the actual solution, making you lose valuable minutes of that 1 hour test, which is why you need to get things right the first time more often. Codeforces contests, and the PClub test series are an excellent way to simulate this environment, and I suggest people dedicate time to them just for this particular reason. I strongly suggest working on these part from the start to the very end of your preparation, since this is by far more vast in terms of workload than what I discuss below.

The second part of my preparation, which was focused on doing Quant-specific topics, involved practising Probability, puzzles, and mental ability. The first, and easiest to train, ability was preparing for the Optiver 80-in-8, which in my opinion is the only part of Optiver’s assessment that can be prepared for. It involves doing 80 mental math problems in 80 minutes, and while the actual test is multi-choice, I decided and recommend that people give the test on rfqjobs since both the questions are of a higher level, and it requires you to go faster than you need to be in the actual test, which means it will be very easy for you, if you consistently give the test two or three times a day. In probability, to anyone just starting out, I can recommend Prof. Rajat Mittal’s notes for CS203 (google it). For practising probability and puzzles, I solved through Brainstellar, and PuzzledQuant online, and doing the books 50 Challenging Problems in Probability, and relevant chapters from Heard on the Street. Apart from these it is very easy to find puzzles and probability questions on the internet — although they may be of varying elvels of relevance to actual interviews, they are still fun to solve and think about in your free time. This part of your preparation can be done easily in the second month (mid — June or July) although you can do it earlier, and go slower. Preparing for these topics was very fun in my experience, and provided a welcome break from coding, as it was much different from things we usually do in college).

Suggestions:

Apart from this, if you have time left over like I did, I recommend delving into Computer Organisation, Operating Systems, and Networks. As a CSE student, I had already done CS220 in the fourth semester, which I ended up revising. I did this because many seniors told me that they were asked questions from these domains. You may be asked questions from this domain in both Quant and Software interviews from all sorts of companies. Although this is a very niche topic to focus on, it will definitely help you get those one or two questions right when you need it the most. I avoided going too deep into the topics, and learned about paging and process scheduling in operating systems, and some fundamentals of TCP and UDP when it came to networks.

Your resume is also a small but important part of your interview preparation. Before the season starts, I suggest having a well designed resume that precisely and concisely outlines everything that you have done, all the projects you have worked on, and the courses you have completed during your semesters, and getting this vetted by your seniors. This will be your master resume, from which you will draft a smaller resume (if required) tailored to the a particular role you will apply for. You resume is the first impression you give to your interviewer, and it is important that you are able to explain every point on your resume in detail, as you will be asked questions from your resume, and it leaves a poor impression to not be able to ask relevant questions about something you have mentioned there.

Okay, so real talk — the above things may seem like a vast amount of work to do, which I totally felt they were, but there is a large amount of time that you have during the summer break if you’re not in college, and even if you are. Above all I would suggest that you are consistent, and I strongly recommend preparing with your friends, since working alone sometimes causes one to lose momentum over time, and two months is a lot of time. Consistent efforts and small progress everyday eventually culminates in big improvements over time, and from getting a perfect score in the mental maths test mentioned above, to reaching the end of the InterviewBit topics roadmap, and getting my solution published in Heard on the Street, everything was only possible due to consistently practicing every day.

You should practice thinking and solving problems out loud, as it was very easy in the beginning, to become flustered when there was a person in front me asking me questions, when my friends sued to ask me questions as we discussed problems in Google Meets. It helps to close your eyes and imagine a person sitting in front of you asking the question you are solving, and you should actively learn to vocalize your problem solving process, so that the interviewer can monitor your progress, and even correct you if you start going into a wrong direction at times. You need to be quick at thinking on your feet, by giving yourself only a fixed time to think about problems that do not have a definite answer. Some extreme examples of this are multiplying numbers on car number plates as I travelled to the swimming pool during the afternoon, challenging myself to do guesstimates at random times during the day (estimate the weight of that truck, or the number of people in that building within 30 minutes, this website), and improving your confidence in the results you come up with — it is better to have a precise and detailed set of reasoning that led you to the wrong result, instead of guessing the correct answer to the problem posed to you. I recommend taking up any doubts you get with your seniors, and I regularly talked to seniors during my interview preparation.

Closing thoughts:

Finally I would recommend everyone reading this to focus on the journey more than the destination. Sometimes things go wrong, maybe you don’t get shortlisted in the role you really wanted, miss the interview for a company you really wanted to interview for and/or were confident you would get selected in, or maybe everything goes perfect and you still don’t get an offer. All of the above things happened to me in spite of preparing all summer and it’s okay, things just go wrong sometimes — what matters more is your preparation, and hoping for the best everything works out in the end.

I would like to end by thanking my seniors Aditya Tanwar, Samarth Arora, Kunwar Preet Singh, Parinay Chauhan, and Prem Bharwani for their help and advice, and all my friends (Apoorva Gupta, Paras Sikarwar and Talin Gupta to name a few) whom I prepared with during the summer.

“You can do whatever you like, but you must work hard to get it”

Thank you for reading!

The Academics and Career Council wishes you all the best in your internship preparation journey. We are here to support you every step of the way. Please feel free to reach out to us for any assistance you may need.