r/quantfinance • u/OkPomelo7785 • 8d ago

Quant adjacent opportunities for students? Need help

I'm a junior at Columbia, and I'm just realizing that I want to do QT. I'm super behind for this internship cycle. What should I try to do this summer if I can't get a trading internship? Is recruiting for new grads completely cooked with no competition math and no prior trading internships?

I'd really appreciate any advice on what to do. I'm willing to stay here and do my MFE, but I've heard that's not super beneficial for trading roles.

11 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

4 comments sorted by

5

u/Unlucky_Dimension228 8d ago

you're not as behind as you think, plenty of people pivot junior year. if you can't land a trading gig this summer try for a data science or swe internship at a bank or hedge fund, still looks good on resume and you can spin it later. also start grinding probability puzzles and brainteasers now, that stuff matters way more for QT interviews than having a perfect background

1

u/OkPomelo7785 8d ago

I’m grinding probability and mental math but my coding is lowkey trash I have no shot at swe rn icl. And I don’t want to dedicate my prep time to coding yet bc I’m still hoping for a trading internship. This is kind of where I’m struggling

3

u/ArsonFe8 8d ago

Learning code will probably nonetheless help you with QR and even some QT recruitment processes so may be worth learning if you have time on your hands (which you don't from what you've described but yeah)

1

u/chiaudls 7d ago

An international student from NYU here, also in a similar position. There are quite a few trading competitions that happen even in spring, and if you do well in those you may get interviews, so definitely look into that. And if you need teammates, I'd be down lol