410 Frequently Asked Questions In Quantitative Finance
Be polite Your mother told you this would be important
one day, this is the day. ‘‘Please,’’ ‘‘thank you,’’ and
actually looking as if you are listening are good things.
Fidgeting, playing with your tie, or looking like you’d
rather be somewhere else aren’t polite. Standing when
people come into the room is good. Occasionally you
will find it appropriate to disagree, this is good, but get
in the habit of using phrases like ‘‘I’m not sure if that’s
the case, perhaps it is...’’
You can’t just wake up one day and be polite on a whim.
(Hint: ‘‘Pretty Woman’’ is fiction, we know this for a fact.)
Without practice, it may even come over as sarcasm. In
some languages ‘‘please’’ and ‘‘thank you’’ are implied in
the context of the sentence, and that habit can spill over
into English. Break that habit, break it now.
Practise sounding positive about things.
Of the things you can change between now and your
interview, this one may have the biggest payback. If
you’ve been doing calculus for a decade, you aren’t
going to improve much in a week. However, you become
better at presenting yourself as someone who’s easy to
work with.
This is so important because your team will spend more
waking hours together than most married couples, and
senior people want to know you will ‘‘fit in.’’ Like much
of this whole process it’s a game. No one really cares if
you have a deep respect for your fellow man, but if you
can emulate it well under pressure it’s a difference that
makes no difference.
Be True to yourself You are selling yourself, so obviously
you will be putting a positive spin on things. However,
this is a career, not a job. If you feel the job may really
not be what you want, then it’s important that you think
