I am a retired quant, and I have a child who is a quant. It’s important to know that quant finance is very selective, even from applicants graduating from a “brand name school”.
Most quant firms hiring undergrads require no finance knowledge (believing that smart people can learn finance quickly), and I will describe their hiring process here. There are three types of roles that quant firms hire undergrads for: quant trading, quant, dev, and software development.
- Quant trading: These are the math superstars, who are so natural in math that they could ace the math section of the SAT while in grade school. These are typically the strongest Math/Statistics/CS/Physics students coming out of colleges like MIT, Princeton, Stanford, and Harvard, and they often have demonstrated strength in math through awards like USAMO or published math research. As an example of selectivity, one of my son’s high school classmates was a very bright student who had a 4.0 GPA at Yale CS, and couldn’t get any interviews for quant trading.
- Software development: These are the students who are exceptionally strong in CS, and can easily do leetcode medium and are comfortable with leetcode hard. Very little math knowledge is expected beyond say linear algebra, but AI knowledge is increasingly important. The Yale student mentioned above received numerous offers for software development roles in quant firms.
- Quant dev: This is the middle ground between quant trading and software development, and the job is to create software to support the quant traders. Since this role requires understanding both the quant traders and software development, proficiency is required in both, but much less math than the quant traders, and significantly less CS excellence than the software development people. Most companies have a smaller number of hires for this role than the other two roles.