Quant Finance Resources

Welcome to the Quant Finance resource portal!

Here we have:

  • Application tips and guidance, collected from industry professionals
  • List of firms offering summer quant-related internships
  • Range of other resources, including past presentations

Internships

Various firms offer internships, generally over summer, but there are a couple of spring programmes and longer placements available. Additionally note that some are only open to MSc/PhD students, while some are specifically for undergraduates.

We have compiled a list of available quantitative finance and related internships, together with length of programme and entry requirements.

VIEW AVAILABLE INTERNSHIPS

Advice and Tips

Pre-application Advice

  • Being a top performer and obtaining a high first in year one is somewhat expected.
  • Competing in math Olympiad competitions, or winning some form of academic prize will make you a more competitive candidate. Alternatively’ having done well in Chess or Poker competitions shows good strategical ability.
  • Some firms may expect you to have some form of coding ability, so it is a good idea to start learning programming language (Python is recommended), if you haven’t already.
  • Read ‘A Practical Guide To Quantitative Finance Interviews’ by Xinfeng Zhou, as well as any online guides to quant interviews you come across (some will be linked in the resources tab).
  • Attend various firm’s campus events – while there. Don’t be afraid to ask questions because the more you can find out about the firm and the role the better.
  • Attend networking events and reach out to people who work in quant finance on LinkedIn (Warwick alumni or others). Ask them about their job in general and any tips for how they secured the role.
  • Try to understand the different roles within quant finance (quant developer, research, analyst, etc…).

Cover Letter and CV Advice

  • Attend WFS CV and cover letter clinics, making sure you first follow the basic advice for building a CV or cover letter.
  • Reading lots of Financial Times articles and understanding the terminology can be useful for sounding better informed about the industry in your cover letter.
  • Make sure you jump through all the HR hoops – knowing the company’s values, how and where they operate, what the exact business model is (people often forget the latter).
  • Remember it will be HR employees reading the cover letters, rather than quants, so target HR.
  • Make sure you mention any of the firms campus events you attended. 

 

General Interview Advice

  • As mentioned in the ‘Pre-application advice’ make sure you have read and practiced possible interview questions, especially around probability.
  • Be confident and be prepared to speak about and back up statements in your CV because they could quiz you on it. 
  • Prepare a few opening lines about yourself to help kick the interview off, not too long.
  • Underline relevant experience, academic or professional, that shows your ability and interest in the quantitative field.
  • If possible research the person who will be interviewing you, and don’t be afraid to email HR asking for more information on the interview process.

Resources

There are a whole range of resources to assist you with landing that dream quant finance role, which we’ve compiled below.

Workshops & Presentations

Warwick Finance Society Quant Finance team run events throughout term, often with industry professions giving presentations.

These are incredibly useful to expand your industry knowledge and potentially gain new skills. The events run regularly are:

  • Speaker Series Events
  • Technical Workshop Events

Podcasts

Other Resources

Programming Resources

Being able to code is extremely important in many areas of quantitative finance, and thus knowing a little programming makes you significantly more employable.

To learn to code, there are a range of interactive courses around, with DataCamp and Codecademy being good examples of these.

Additionally, there are many high-quality blogs tailored specifically towards programming for quant finance and trading, such as R-bloggers, The R Trader, PyQuant News, QuantStart and Trading with Python.

Self-Paced Learning Portals