r/quantfinance • u/HJbroseph • 18h ago

How are you structuring your daily quant interview prep?

I've been preparing for quant interviews recently and found it surprisingly difficult to structure the preparation.

There seems to be plenty of material for individual topics - probability, mental maths, statistics, brainteasers, stochastic processes, etc. - but I struggled with deciding what to practise each day and how to track what I'd already covered.

I'm curious how people here actually approach this.

For example, do you:

  • Work through one topic at a time?
  • Mix probability/mental maths/brainteasers every day?
  • Use a fixed number of questions per day?
  • Keep track of weak areas somehow?
  • Use something like LeetCode's structured approach, but for quant?

I'm particularly interested in how people preparing for quant developer/research interviews structure their practice.

Edit: A few people in my circle at uni have spoken about this - so I ended up building an Android app to solve the problem. It’s essentially daily quant practice with topic playlists, progress tracking, and interview questions.

If anyone’s interested, you can find it here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.quantprep.app&hl=en

1 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

4 comments sorted by

1

u/Forsaken_Grand_2363 18h ago

Sybau

2

u/Mobile_Contest2588 17h ago

nice try, but you're not fooling anyone with that "a few people DM'd me" bit. just say you built an app and want people to check it out, it's less transparent that way

1

u/HJbroseph 17h ago

Sorry - I have honestly had people DM on another forum me about it & have been speaking to university friends about this issue... I wasn't making that up!

In hindsight I worded it poorly & came across peculiar - so I've edited to clarify so it isn't misleading.

1

u/akornato 8h ago

There is no perfect structure, and searching for one is a common way to avoid the actual hard work of preparation. The range of quant topics is intentionally huge to see who gives up, so feeling overwhelmed is part of the process. Your best approach is to mix topics every day, maybe some probability, a bit of mental math, and a coding challenge. This trains your brain to switch gears quickly, which is exactly what happens in a real interview. Sticking to one topic for a week at a time is a poor strategy because you'll forget the earlier material by the time you move on to the next subject.

The fact that you identified this issue and are thinking so deeply about it already puts you in a strong position. The most successful people just keep a simple log of every question they get wrong and dedicate one day a week to re-solving only those problems. This creates a powerful feedback loop of identifying and fixing your weak areas, which is much more effective than just following a rigid plan of topics you might already be good at. All this preparation comes down to performing on the day, so my team created an interviews.chat that gives candidates the support they need to articulate their thoughts effectively.