Spring into Quant Finance Attendee Review

The program was a fully packed week at a hotel in the south of France. It involved lectures from quants on various topics, such as their day to day life and the use of NLP in their work. There was also hands-on workshops on finance, machine learning, and statistics, where participants got to learn and apply their skills.

I learned a lot about the daily life as a quant and what it entails, as well as gained a lot of context for how ML is used in the finance world. I also learnt a number of finance concepts, such as pairs trading during the statistics workshop.

I believe the company did a great job at explaining the potential roles and progressions: they gave multiple examples of career paths of various people and the different ways people can progress (i.e. individual contributor vs manager tracks), and they also organized a number of networking sessions with quants where we can ask any questions we have.

Company culture was very nice and very welcoming, everyone seemed super happy and very friendly/welcoming (disclaimer: this was at a very nice hotel and not the standard office, so this might skew what I saw). People were secretive about their exact work, but I think this might be the norm for finance. Everyone I asked loves their job, and it encourages me to consider a career there.

I very much enjoyed the insight -- I believe it was a great way to learn about the career path and answer any question a potential candidate might have. Further, it seemed that no expense was spared when it came to our week there: we stayed at a 5 star hotel and had amazing food. As most of the participants were grad students, this amount of luxury was an amazing surprise.

Yes

Definitely don't be afraid to apply due to a lack of background in finance -- this is what I thought at a point but it is not important at all. I recommend anyone who is interested to apply!