u/CartographerOnly7843

Hi everyone,

I was in the first round of an interview for a quant role at an asset management firm

For context im completely entry level, no licensure, 1yr internship looking for full time role (with 1yr exp econ. research, econometrics, statistical modeling and 1yr exp open source SWE) with masters in Econ from T30

I was explaining my previous projects and what I currently do as a job (open source software engineer lol, basically unemployed) and I felt that I was talking quite a lot about non-quant analysis projects (as I have background in OOP & econ. research and econometrics) so I asked the interviewer what kinds of projects are commonly worked on

They mentioned weight optimization in their portfolios which I had done recently, so I said, verbatim...

"Oh, yes, I've worked on this recently! I don't know if this is unethical or illegal but I have a friend who works at (insert specific company name here) who asked me for advice on weight optimization for their covered call strategy"

The interviewer did not like this, and replied "Yeah, you probably shouldn't have said that." with an awkward laugh so I quickly replied "Ok, then we'll just leave that there without going into any further specifics like numbers or anything.", changed the subject to another project, and continued the interview for another 2 minutes or so, before I got very spooked and anxious about what had just happened and said, thank you for the interview, can't wait to speak soon and continue the process, and hung up with 5 minutes left in a 30 min interview

Am I cooked? It was a genuine mistake as I was eager to talk specifically about my experience and what I've worked on in the past

I had another interview about 30 minutes after that one ended which went perfectly, first interview was with a director, second interview was with someone who is not as high up

This company was basically my dream job which is why im coming to reddit about it, beating myself up quite bad about this blunder...

Hi everyone,

I was in the first round of an interview for a quant role at an asset management firm

For context im completely entry level, no licensure, 1yr internship looking for full time role (with 1yr exp econ. research, econometrics, statistical modeling and 1yr exp open source SWE) with masters in Econ from T30

I was explaining my previous projects and what I currently do as a job (open source software engineer lol, basically unemployed) and I felt that I was talking quite a lot about non-quant analysis projects (as I have background in OOP & econ. research and econometrics) so I asked the interviewer what kinds of projects are commonly worked on

They mentioned weight optimization in their portfolios which I had done recently, so I said, verbatim...

"Oh, yes, I've worked on this recently! I don't know if this is unethical or illegal but I have a friend who works at (insert specific company name here) who asked me for advice on weight optimization for their covered call strategy"

The interviewer did not like this, and replied "Yeah, you probably shouldn't have said that." with an awkward laugh so I quickly replied "Ok, then we'll just leave that there without going into any further specifics like numbers or anything.", changed the subject to another project, and continued the interview for another 2 minutes or so, before I got very spooked and anxious about what had just happened and said, thank you for the interview, can't wait to speak soon and continue the process, and hung up with 5 minutes left in a 30 min interview

Am I cooked? It was a genuine mistake as I was eager to talk specifically about my experience and what I've worked on in the past

I had another interview about 30 minutes after that one ended which went perfectly, first interview was with a director, second interview was with someone who is not as high up

This company was basically my dream job which is why im coming to reddit about it, beating myself up quite bad about this blunder...

I have a bachelor's and a master's degree in economics studying financial modeling and econometrics. I had a full time position as a research assistant, then an internship doing equity research.

After graduating with my Bachelors in 2023, I applied to hundreds, perhaps thousands of jobs, constantly re-writing my resume, constant cold e-mailing. I had to take a survival job at MCDONALDS where all my coworkers regularly asked "why are you here?" I've visited my college's (and master's college) career center four seperate times and they've always pushed some paid resume rewriting service on me or they give me the whole Linkedin cold emailing thing, which I've been doing.

I went back to school because it was so agonizing and I figured it would help in my job search. After $60,000+ more in debt, I still havent heard back from ONE application I've sent online.

I had a strong referral from my supervisor during my internship at a real deal post-grad job. 5+ interviews, 2 projects. Denied and they went with someone else. "We'll refer you to other roles and keep you in mind". Been a few weeks, crickets. This is the ONLY lead I've had.

What can I possibly do? Is anyone else in the same boat? All my peers have jobs, maybe not the best jobs, but they have them. I'm an open source codebase maintainer on Github and work fulltime for free developing code and doing code review ever since I graduated. Yes this is on my resume. No I haven't heard back from any jobs after putting it there.

Does anyone have any advice?