My interview experience with JP Morgan Chase & Co, Quantitative Researcher Summer internship.

Round 1 (Technical)

The interviewer was a middle aged man, after making general talk about the weather and the internship process, he started going over my resume. He asked me why was a biotech student applying for a quant role, and wanted me to describe one of my projects. This went on for about 5-7 minutes. He then asked me two puzzles

  1. You have a box with numbers from 1 to 100, with one number missing. Your friend throws these numbers at you one by one (might not be in order). How would you determine which number was missing
  2. There are n teams playing an elimination tournament. n could be odd. Two teams play a match, and the winner moves on to the next round, the loser is eliminated. This goes on until there is only one team left. How many matches are played.

Both questions were pretty straight forward, and I answered them quickly.

He then moved on to coding. I told him that I only know python, and he asked me to generate the following pattern using a list comprehension with only one for loop. [1,2,3,1,4,9,1,8,27]

I could code it in about a minute or two, but I made sure that I was thinking out loud (not blabbering). He asked me to do it in a couple of more ways and he was satisfied with my answer.

He then asked me to code any sorting algorithm that I knew. I coded merge-sort and explained the time complexity to him.

Since I had a lot of fin on my resume, we had a discussion on ETFs and mutual funds. He wanted to make sure that I had more than just superficial knowledge of these things.

I was immediately called for the next round.

Round 2 (Technical)

The next interviewer was younger, in his late twenties perhaps. He spent about 5 minutes minutely reading every word in my resume. Since I had two projects involving monte Carlo simulations, almost the entirety of the interview was based on monte carlo. He asked me to explain the weak law of large numbers, the central limit theorem and the advantages of using monte carlo.

He gave me some data about stock prices, their default probability and a correlation matrix, and asked me to write the pseudocode for a monte carlo simulation to estimate the reward to risk ratio of the portfolio. This went on for about 20 minutes, where we were building upon previous steps and improving the model. It was more of a collaborative effort, where we both came up with ideas to make the model better. He was satisfied with the final algorithm and we moved on to some ML and python questions.

Then he asked me the math behind regression and least squares, gradient descent and logistic regression.

He asked me to explain what a decorator was, which I did. He then asked me to explain shallow copy and deep copy which I also did. Finally he asked me if I knew any object oriented programming. I made it clear to him that I only know some concepts, and have implemented basic OOP in python, but nothing more. He then asked some question about static and private variables, but before I could answer he said that it’s ok and asked me to leave.

5 minutes later I was called for my next round

Round 3 (Math + Technical)

This was the most grilling round for me. It was an online interview, I couldn’t see the interviewer’s face and it was really weird just staring into the screen. He started with the egg drop riddle, before he could finish, I told him I knew what he’s asking and answered the riddle. Then he asked me about taylor series, and asked me to explain the intuition behind it, derive heron’s formula, which I did after a hint. He asked me to explain Newton Raphson’s method. He also asked me to explain (not code) how two genes are compared using edit distance. In the last few minutes he asked me to explain some stats concepts p values and hypothesis testing and asked me how are these used to infer results from Randomised Controlled Trials.

I fumbled with the stats questions and this was a huge dip compared to my last two interviews.

I was called for an HR Round 10 minutes later.

Round 4 (HR)

Unlike what I had heard from others, the HR round was not just a mere formality. It would have been, had my 3rd round gone flawlessly, but since it went terribly, I knew that I had to impress the HR.

He asked me how my interviews went, and I was honest with him and told him that the first two were amazing, but the second one was not that great, I told him that since it was online, I was having trouble establishing a rapport with my interviewer. He nodded in agreement, and he spent some time ranting about the intern team and the weather xD. He then asked me to explain my understanding of the QR role at JPMC. I knew this very well, and he was happy with my answer.

He asked me what was a biotech guy doing at a JPMC QR interview. I had a good story prepared and spoke for about 5 minutes about how I always loved finance and coding, and chose the institute for the opportunities and not the branch.

He then asked me to explain any one of the projects on my resume to him, but without using any technical terms. I had an agent based modeling project on the formation of opinions in society, which I explained to him, and he liked my explanation of the project.

He asked me what I bring to the team and why I would be a good fit (I already had answers prepared for these questions). Finally we chatted about a ted talk and he gave me fundaes on what it takes to excel in the corporate world.

I was told that I would be having no further rounds and that they’d let me know the result.

5 hours later I received an offer.