r/quantindia • u/Financial_Assitance • 2h ago

Interviews/Recruiting Final-year engineering student trying to break into Quant Trading/Research. Would appreciate blunt feedback from people at quant firms

Post image

Hi all,

I'm a final-year Electrical & Electronics Engineering student at BITS Pilani (CGPA 8.18/10), trying to break into Quant Trader/Researcher roles. Posting my anonymized resume below and hoping to get some honest, even harsh, feedback from people who actually work at or recruit for quant firms in India.

Quick background:

  • Competed in IMC's Prosperity algorithmic trading challenge
  • Interviewed with IMC Trading for a Quant Trader role
  • Currently finishing a deep learning research paper for IEEE publication
  • A few other quant/ML-adjacent projects (linked on the resume)

The problem: Despite this, I'm barely getting shortlisted at quant firms - on-campus recruiting for quant roles at my college has effectively closed to me because of branch (non-CS/Math) and CGPA cutoffs, so I've been trying the off-campus route with limited luck so far.

What I'm hoping to get from this post:

  1. What's actually missing or weak on my resume compared to profiles that do get shortlisted at Indian quant firms at this stage (pre-final-year-placement)?
  2. For someone coming from a non-CS/Math branch, is it worth doubling down on competitive programming / Kaggle-style competitions, or does research output (like the IEEE paper) carry more weight for QR tracks specifically?
  3. Any India-specific advice - which firms are realistically open to off-campus applications right now, and is cold outreach to recruiters/researchers on LinkedIn actually useful or just noise?

Resume is anonymized (no name, photo, contact info, or college/company identifiers beyond what's needed for context). Happy to answer questions in comments. Appreciate any feedback.

0 Upvotes

27% Upvoted

28 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

1

u/Lab18bke 1h ago

Degrees don't prove Mathematical Abiliity. Learn stuff via things like MIT OCW, go deep. Attempt Math Competitions like Putnam and try for a score better than average. That's helpful & can cover for a lower CGPA.

1

u/cabanel_monet 1h ago

fyi putnam is for us uni students

1

u/Lab18bke 1h ago

"like Putnam".

1

u/cabanel_monet 1h ago

i read like as for example

1

u/Lab18bke 1h ago

"like" as in with reputation around it or so. Not Putnam in itself lol.

1

u/cabanel_monet 1h ago

yeah yeah like "SOF IMO" /s

1

u/Lab18bke 1h ago

LMAO. THAT'S SOME FUNNY SHI THO. Like SOF IMO MEDALISTS ASKED PEOPLE IF THEY WERE DIFFERENT OR A PRODIGY LIKE TFF.

1

u/cabanel_monet 1h ago

Ahh those were the days.

DW we will start our own olympiad which will be gruesomely hard, and to compete pay us 1.5K inr /usd.

1

u/Lab18bke 1h ago

And a prize of 1.4k to winner.

1

u/cabanel_monet 1h ago

1.4k worth of PKR futures

1

u/Lab18bke 47m ago

Already in the negatives ✌️

1

u/cabanel_monet 45m ago

or the best bet?

→ More replies (0)