"Electronic trading internships are an eight-week job interview. This is how you convert one."
I’ve secured multiple internships at electronic trading firms and am returning to one full-time this year. In my prior internships outside the sector, I was essentially handed a problem and left alone to work on it. In quant trading, internships are more like an 8-week interview.
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You’ll usually do a project during your internship in which you’re solving some kind of problem, and you’ll have an hour a day at least to spend with some traders and talk about what you’re doing. There’s a sort of cold dance through which work is performed. It can feel quite dramatic, and I feel like some people go into it wrongheadedly. Those people are a bit too keen on being correct and winning arguments, flailing about to prove their point. In their eyes they’re doing better than everyone else but they’re missing the point.
It’s not fundamentally about being correct but working together to find a solution through a Socratic process. The dynamics of this can be quite varied. Sometimes, you and the traders will come up with ideas for a problem and work through it together, but there’s also a more destructive side.
Once you have a theory for your problem, someone may look at what you’ve done and rattle questions for your ideas until you can’t answer any more. They’ll ask you ‘why did you do it this way and not that way?’ They'll find a reason why your argument doesn’t work and see how you respond to that. They’ll also ask you to explain a technique or technology they don’t recognize and teach it to them.
Depending on the personality of the trader, this can feel very harsh. You’re not arguing with them, but the psychology of it makes you feel like you’re in a pressure cooker; the temperature is slowly increasing and you’re inside trying to bash it open.
There are happier stories too. You’ll give a trader your narrative and they’ll say they had the same idea. Even then though, ideas aren’t treated as precious. They’re taken seriously, but they’re also thrown around.
A discussion ends one of three ways. You might convince them of your idea, but if you fail to do so, it will take the form of either admitting a mistake or agreeing to disagree. These discussions are fundamentally a good thing, and responding to them well is important. It’s an effective way of internalizing basic principles, and if you did get something wrong, it’s good to have it isolated and excavated so you understand why it’s wrong.
Even if you do things right, you might not get in; some people in my cohort who I was very confident in did not get a return offer. I thought I only had a 30% chance and was very surprised I received mine.
Samuel King is a pseudonym
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