Master's degree but no full-time work experience. Where to start?

a路径积分 · Post by **a路径积分** » Thu Nov 12, 2015 5:27 am

>Repeat post<

goldorak · Post by **goldorak** » Thu Nov 12, 2015 8:16 am

@mtsm: UK is not in Europe, and France is just and will always just be, well, France. Wink

Lebowski · Post by **Lebowski** » Thu Nov 12, 2015 8:28 am

@a___ thanks for your insight and explaining a bit about your approach.

Follow up question: If the hard part is indeed assessing how well even your best applicants do in their given jobs, what is your position on internships? I'm done with this process at this point barring anything disastrous happening with background checks, etc, so this is just a curiousity. I've noticed that a lot of the small HFT shops ostensibly similar to yours are very reluctant to give internships, but what better indication of full time performance could exist than bringing prospective hires in for a few months and test driving them? I can't imagine why so few small HFT shops do this. It's not as if an intern is going to do anything competitive with your IP, if even see it. I imagine some of the smaller shops just aren't equipped to handle babysitting an intern, but even a lot of the elite mid sized shops like Teza, Headlands, and Jump don't offer internships. Another limitation is obviously that prop trading training takes a long time, but I think 10-12 weeks will still be sufficient for a company to assess a prospective hire's aptitudes and potential to learn the remaining material if given a full time offer. Would you care to comment on why so few HFT shops offer internships or discuss your position on the subject if that last step of associating good cumulative interview performance and full time job performance is indeed the tough part?

Lebowski · Post by **Lebowski** » Thu Nov 12, 2015 8:28 am

(Deleted repost)

a路径积分 · Post by **a路径积分** » Thu Nov 12, 2015 12:31 pm

Your hypothesis is mostly correct:

> I imagine some of the smaller shops just aren't equipped to handle babysitting an intern[.]

The only reason to take on an intern is an investment in a potential hire and HR. If you don't babysit an intern enough, then it defeats the purpose since the intern will go back telling his/her classmates that the experience was uninteresting. But if you babysit an intern, it becomes time-consuming and takes time off your short-term concerns. Smaller firms like Teza and Headlands have a lot of short-term concerns.

Where your hypothesis fails is in explaining Jump. Jump is in a different class. They're much larger so they have fewer short-term concerns. Jump used to offer internships in its Chicago office. They still do in London. In their case, it's just a matter of cost benefit analysis as they are operating in the pareto frontier of business objectives.

Lebowski · Post by **Lebowski** » Thu Nov 12, 2015 2:08 pm

@a___ so to summarize, you don't think the potential opportunity of evaluating their expected full time performance is worth the effort to babysit an intern in most cases?

My bad on Jump, I know they're at least 350-400 employees, which is still way bigger than the other two, but I was unaware they offered internships in the US at all. They're pretty secretive. Thanks for the info.

Jurassic · Post by **Jurassic** » Wed Aug 15, 2018 9:00 pm

> The real question is should you do a PhD just to get a quant role? The answer to this is NO! Because you need a good PhD in pure math / stats. But to get a good one you need to be intrinsically motivated and not motivated by career goals. There are some threads on PhD necessity on here...

Im struggling to find the PhD necessity threads. Can anyone help?