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Last edited on the 17th of September 2024
If you are a STEM student with 1-2 years until graduation (this can be more if you have plans for further studies), use my referral links to apply to the Optiver summer internships! Having a referral link ensures that you application does not get discarded automatically, you will always at least have one interview.
Javier’s Optiver Referral Links
An important fact of life is that, in these kind of interviews, questions are predictable. If you read all the solved exercises in the material attached to this document, the chances that the recruiting team at some firm can come up with a question that uses a completely novel idea that you have never seen is about 0. Interviews are a very imperfect way to measure skill and you should absolutely take advantage of that.
Almost everything I say in this document has already been said by Callum McDougall in the following PDF. You should start your journey there, I recommend you go read Sections 0-3 before coming back to this text.
Treat the present document as a small addendum to McDougall’s much better guide. Here, I’ll explain my personal experience + a couple of hot tips that he missed. You’ll get extra value from reading this document if you have a similar profile to mine: a mathematics and/or computer science student from either FME/CFIS or Cambridge.
In the Summer of 2023, I spent a very large number of hours preparing for the interview process at Quant firms. In the Fall, I applied to 5-6 firms and got offers from SIG and Optiver. I will intern at Optiver this summer (2024). This document is a summary of everything I did to prepare for the interviews. On top of that, I will add some basic information about Quant firms, applications and interviews that I have not found neatly compiled elsewhere.
The whole document is focused on getting a summer internship, simply because this is was what I did. Some of you might be interested in New Grad roles. To the best of my knowledge, all the information and training material given here will also be useful for New Grad interviews. If you are elegible for both an internship and a New Grad role, I recommend you shoot your shot at the internship. Usually the process is a bit less involved and you have better chances. If you get an internship, this will give you a longer period to prove your value to the company, which should make it easier to get a full time position. Warning: If you are in the last year of university or have already graduated, there will be some summer internships for which you are non-elegible. Make sure to check!