406 Frequently Asked Questions In Quantitative Finance
Governor Schwarzenegger. Although Dr Simpson has
enjoyed careers as an astronaut, rock star and nuclear
engineer, few of us would hire him as a quant. It’s
important to get the right balance between gushing
at people so fast that they have trouble following you,
or being too quiet. You should try to practise looking
at the reaction of people talking to you, and if the inter-
viewer is clearly trying to move on, you usually should
let them. If you think of the conversation style used
when first meeting someone you find attractive, you
won’t go far wrong. (Just remember it’s a first date.)
It is also the case that no one wants to discriminate
against those who aren’t English speakers. This is good,
but means that if you aren’t understood they may just
skip over what you say, rather than pass comment on
your accent. This is especially true when having a tele-
phone interview where you will not get visual feedback,
and the sound quality is degraded.
Read your CV Make sure that your CV is correct. A
surprisingly large number have dates that are clearly
wrong, or that by accident give the wrong impression.
These worry interviewers a lot, and if your dates don’t
match, this can lose you an offer when they do the
basic background check on all employees. Also read it
to work out which questions it might provoke them to
ask, ‘‘Why did you pick X?’’ ‘‘I see you’ve done a lot of
Y, here’s a hard question about it.’’
Mobile phone interviews We’re old people (>35), and thus
sometimes use quaint ’phone technology which involves
long wires physically connecting us to a huge ancient
Unix computer miles away (yes, we still use miles). A
typical quant has done enough physics to know that you
can actually talk down copper wires rather than a 1 mm
thick cell phone that has more processing capacity than
its owner.
