398 Frequently Asked Questions In Quantitative Finance
fight each other with swords, it’s the sort of thing that
catches people’s eyes, and can make a crucial differ-
ence. It also gives the non-specialist people who you
will meet something they can talk to you about.
Last job first In your CV your most recent/current
employment should stand out and be relevant to the
job for which you are applying. Someone reading your
CV may never get beyond this one piece of information.
Make sure your dates are correct. As part of the pre-
employment screen at most banks, they check your
past employment, and people have had offers withdrawn
because of mistakes on this.
Paul & Dominic When applying to P&D, we also like to
see a simple list of the various skills you have acquired,
together with some estimate of how good you are. If
you’re new to QF then it won’t be obvious which are
most important, that’s our job, so include as many as
possible.
Multiple CVs Finally, there is no reason why you should
have only one CV. Presumably your entire life doesn’t
fit on two pages, so you can turn out a variety that each
emphasize different aspects of your experience and
education. You may take this as an exercise to work
out the optimal number of variants, and you will quickly
find out that it is not one. This is made more acute by
the fact that failed CVs get little if any feedback. Think
of it as shooting in the dark. If you don’t hear a scream
when you fire in one direction, you aim somewhere else.
Finding banks In this document, we use the term ‘‘bank’’
for the firm you want to work for. It is of course the
case that quants work for many types of outfit, including
brokers, the government, hedge funds, insurers, thrifts,
