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Sarah Chieng is a former intern at Hudson River Trading and Susquehanna International Group.
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She said a common myth is people think quant trading firms only recruit top school grads.
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Chieng also said that the firms care about your research and analytical skills.
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Sarah Chieng, a 22-year-old former intern at Hudson River Trading, and Susquehanna International Group based in San Francisco. The following has been edited for length and clarity.
I was born and raised in Austin, TX and went to MIT for college. I studied mathematics and computer science, and at the very beginning of my freshman year, student clubs were recruiting. Some clubs felt super exclusive and elite — they probably only took 10 people per grade.
After seeing many of my friends go into quant trading, I also applied and got into a club called "Traders at MIT." I heard enticing stories about working at quant trading firms: the job pays well, and the companies pamper their interns. Firms will fly interns out, put them up in hotels, treat them to nice meals, and take them to mini golf and Broadway shows.
By my junior year, I landed two summer internships at big-name quant trading firms, Susquehanna International Group (SIG) and Hudson River Trading (HRT), and a five-day micro bootcamp internship at PEAK6.
During SIG's "Discovery Day," an event for students to learn about what a day in the life looks like across SIG teams, the company catered sushi and gave students Yeti tumblers and other swag.
Then, I had the same experience when I became an intern — during the internship, we stayed in a hotel and had room service every week. In the first week, we had nice meals at a gorgeous venue by the water and, throughout the summer, full-time employees took us out for sushi and steak dinners. All these extravagant events were alluring for students, especially because we were young.
My day-to-day was split between learning option theory from my teacher and asking questions at different trading desks. I shadowed traders and asked them questions left and right to understand their trade logic.
HRT is headquartered in New York City and focuses on high-frequency, automated trading, meaning traders don't need to be at their desks watching screens all day — they're more likely to research data science on financial data to look for patterns or trends.
As an intern, I was assigned several projects throughout the summer. One of them was using Jupyter Notebook to sift through financial information and find what we call "alpha," or the observation or trends that we could potentially trade on.
Like SIG, HRT also treated us to really nice meals. We regularly went to the most expensive restaurants in New York City once or twice a week — it seemed like there was no spending limit for these meals.
I learned a lot about the industry after my internships, and here are the three things I think most people get wrong about quant trading firms.
There's a common belief that quant trading firms only recruit students from Ivy League schools. In every internship I've done, I've met many people who didn't come from Ivy Leagues — some went to University of Michigan, Rutgers University, and UC Berkeley.
I remember in one of my interviews, the HR person made it clear right off the bat that they don't even look at what school you're from when they review resumes; they review resumes "school blind."
I know some people might not believe it, but I think it's true. My internship class was very diverse, and those who eventually got return offers weren't just the students from top colleges.
Trading firms don't expect you to walk into an interview with a bunch of trader-specific skills and knowledge. What these firms are really after is how quick you are on your feet, and how you think — they just want to see how quick you are. That's their real gauge of whether you'll do well.
Take my HRT interview, for example. After I got through the hour-long online quiz with about 15 questions, I got into the next round. They threw me questions about stats, probabilities, normal variables, and even a card-playing game. I remember they gave me four cards, and told me that I had to trade on what I thought the sum of these four cards was. And then every round they flipped one card over. It was a fun experience.
In total, it took about a month and a half to finish all the interviews and land the internship.
One thing I noticed at trading firms is that they don't care if you do well in your projects — we weren't expected to make huge decisions or contribute meaningfully. For example, when I worked at HRT, one of the projects I was on was to trade crypto, but the 'trading' that interns did wasn't live trading at all — there was no real money involved. It was more like practice, or mock trading.
The internship itself felt more like a long interview — the company constantly observed how I performed and evaluated whether or not they wanted me for a full-time position.
There was a decent amount of turnover in the first year or so. Most trading firms will have a trading training period — sometimes it's two or three months, and sometimes it's up to a year. Some firms do cuts afterward based on how you perform during the training.
In a nutshell, what these firms care about are your research and analytical skills. Are you able to come up with good ideas? Think creatively? Analyze financial data and find something that they can trade off? That's what they are looking for.
After my three internships, I realized trading just wasn't something I cared enough about. Initially, I pursued it for two reasons: it offered financial stability and allowed me to stay in New York, where many of my friends were. Also, because I devoted so much time already to trading internships, it seemed like the easiest path for me.
Looking back, I feel like I got into quant due to herd mentality. The fact that many of my friends went into it and these firms pay their employees very well made it appealing. I definitely experienced the work perks that I had heard about — nice dinners, broadway shows, soccer games, cruises, and ice skating games — but the job itself wasn't something I cared enough about, and because of that, I'd always be mediocre at it.
During the end of my sophomore year of college, I had the opportunity to take a gap semester to work in a startup with another MIT student. I feel like I'm a creative and strategic person, so I was able to shine in a startup environment. I also liked how much freedom I had.
It took me about a year before I decided to jump into a startup, and I'm happy that my parents were super supportive about it. I realized that I'm okay without having an extravagant lifestyle — as long as I'm working on something that I'm excited about with people I like, that's all I need.
Today, I work at a startup called Metaphor, a platform that uses machine learning to generate high-quality search results. I'm very happy that I made the pivot — I've learned the importance of pursuing what I love.
If you worked at a quant trading firm and want to share your story, email Aria Yang at ayang@businessinsider.com.
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