Interactive Roadmap
Interview Prep Plan
A focused 3-month sprint to get you ready for quant trader, developer, and researcher interviews. Follow it sequentially or jump to the month that matches where you are right now.
Don't just solve — verbalize
Interviewers evaluate your reasoning process, not just the answer. Practice explaining every step out loud from day one.
20 minutes a day beats marathons
Mental math fluency and probability intuition come from daily repetition, not occasional cram sessions the week before.
Recruit while still preparing
You never finish becoming ready. Applications, networking, and prep run in parallel — start both before you feel ready.
Track-specific depth matters
A trader, developer, and researcher face very different interviews. Use the track guides to calibrate where to go deep.
- Memorize squares 1–25 and cubes 1–15 cold — recite both lists forward and backward
- Learn Vedic multiplication tricks: ×11, ×25, near-100 squares, and squaring numbers ending in 5
- Practice percent changes and fraction-to-decimal conversions until they feel automatic
- Drill 20 min/day using AggieQuant's Mental Math game — target 20+ correct in 90 seconds on Easy, then advance to Medium
- Master sample spaces, events, and the axioms of probability — build formal notation habits early
- Work through Bayes' theorem with 5 fully written-out examples, including false positive paradoxes
- Practice expected value and combinatorics (combinations, permutations, stars and bars)
- Read Heard on the Street Chapters 1–3 — attempt each problem before reading the solution
- Set up Python, Jupyter, pandas, numpy, and matplotlib in a clean virtual environment
- Load and clean a real OHLCV CSV (daily stock data) — handle NaNs, reindex, parse dates
- Compute rolling means, rolling standard deviation, and pairwise correlations between tickers
- Plot a price series with buy/sell annotations — build a habit of visualizing before modeling
- Read A Practical Guide to Quantitative Finance Interviews (Green Book) Chapters 1–2
- Solve 3 problems per day — write full solutions, not just answers; review where your reasoning diverged
- Practice saying your solution out loud: articulate assumptions, approach, and sanity checks
- Attend AggieQuant's Probability & Brainteasers session if available — get live feedback on your process
Month 1 goal: Arithmetic should feel automatic and probability setups should feel structured. You are building reflexes, not cramming facts.
- Build call and put payoff diagrams from scratch — understand intrinsic vs. extrinsic value intuitively
- Derive risk-neutral pricing and work through the Black-Scholes derivation step by step
- Implement Black-Scholes in Python: price calls and puts, then compute all 5 Greeks analytically
- Plot P&L surfaces varying spot, strike, and time to expiry — make the Greeks visceral, not abstract
- Study limit order book structure: how orders queue, match, and execute at top-of-book vs. market depth
- Decompose bid-ask spreads into adverse selection cost, inventory cost, and order processing cost
- Play Riverboat Broker on the AggieQuant competition portal — reflect on how pricing intuition develops
- Read Trading and Exchanges Chapters 1–4 for a practitioner-level view of market mechanics
- Review key distributions: normal, log-normal, Poisson, and their roles in financial modeling
- Understand non-stationarity, autocorrelation, and why standard train/test splits fail on time series
- Build a simple momentum signal in Python — use walk-forward validation to avoid look-ahead bias
- Read ISLR Chapters 1–4 to reinforce regression, classification, and cross-validation intuition
- Developer track: Solve 20 medium LeetCode problems — focus on arrays, hash maps, heaps, and sorting
- Developer track: Review C++ memory management, templates, and concurrency basics; be ready to discuss trade-offs
- Trader/Researcher: Finish Green Book Chapters 3–6 — focus on stochastic processes and statistics sections
- All tracks: time yourself at 20 min per problem and practice explaining your approach before coding
Month 2 goal: You should be able to explain options pricing, order book mechanics, and a basic backtest to a non-technical person. Depth comes from being able to teach it, not just recite it.
- Quantify every bullet point — replace vague action verbs with specific outcomes (e.g., "reduced latency by 40%")
- Tailor your top section to your target track: signal the right skills first for Dev vs. Trader vs. Researcher
- Do a peer review with 2 other members using AggieQuant's structured rubric — give and receive specific feedback
- Map out application deadlines for target firms and prioritize based on fit and timing
- Complete 2 full mock interview sessions with partners — rotate roles so you get reps on both sides
- Round 1: 3 probability/mental math problems (20 min each) with 10 min of structured feedback
- Round 2: 2 track-specific technical questions — coding for Dev, market scenarios for Trader, modeling for Researcher
- Group debrief: identify the most common reasoning gaps and assign targeted problem sets to close them
- Build a curated list of 15–20 target professionals on LinkedIn — focus on alumni, recent hires, and researchers at target firms
- Draft 3 personalized cold messages using the AggieQuant template — reference their work specifically, not just their firm
- Follow up with any discovery day contacts you made earlier in the semester — a short, direct check-in
- Prepare your 60-second verbal pitch: who you are, what you've done, and what you're looking for — practice it out loud
- Deep dive on 5 target firms: research their trading style, public-facing papers, recent news, and interview reputation
- Study each firm's interview format — some are pure math, some have live trading simulations, some emphasize coding
- Be ready to discuss your 2–3 strongest projects in detail: hypothesis, methodology, results, and what you'd do differently
- Final timed sprint: 30 mixed problems (math + probability + track-specific) in 60 minutes — simulate real pressure
Month 3 goal: Walk into every interview knowing your own story cold, able to run a 20-minute problem session cleanly, and with a specific reason you want to work at each firm you're targeting.
Want structured prep sessions? AggieQuant runs recurring probability sessions, mental math drills, and mock interview rounds during the semester. Check the Events page for upcoming dates, or reach out at bago2007@tamu.edu.