JP Telephone Interview

[PhDGradNM]

Hi everyone,

I have been invited to the first round of interviews for the PhD Quant Research position at JPM (London). I was notified on Friday evening, with slot options on the following Monday (which I think is certainly not enough time for prep). I went ahead and booked the interview which seemed like the only option at the time, giving me only 1 day to prepare for it (I had a deadline on the saturday). I come from a CS background and I am relatively new to financial mathematics hence I need a lot of prep work for the interview. Now prior to being invited for the interview, my circumstances changed regarding applying for jobs as my thesis submission was pushed forward and I have since stopped applying for jobs, but I did not withdraw my application at JP as I thought it would be bad for my record and i never thought they would get back to me so soon.

I am now contemplating on whether to cancel my phone interview/withdraw my application until I am done with my PhD submission when I have more time to prepare. The benefits of this would be that I don't risk my chances of passing the interview. Also, I have been told that the openings for QR are very few but they have to go with interviews etc. for formality, which could mean that there are no positions at the moment. My doubts are mainly about the consequences of cancelling the interview/withdrawing my application. will this affect my future application? If i don't pass the telephone interview, will this affect future applications? which one is worse?

Your help is much appreciated,

 

[Keith Tan]

how long did they take to notify you from the day you submitted your application?

 

[PhDGradNM]

Keith Tan around 3 weeks. Can you help?

 

[Keith Tan]

1. i applied countless times to JPM. opportunity only knocks once.
2. they can accommodate your employment date or whenever you are prepared to work with them. but interviews first (they have probably n,000 applications waiting). they have a deadline to meet, i suppose.
3. Prep work can be found at http://www.facebook.com/jpmorgancommunity?fref=ts and http://careers.jpmorgan.com/student/jpmorgan/careers/us/advice.
4. a simple phone interview couldn't be hard. the onus are in the subsequent rounds.
5. good luck.

 

[PhDGradNM]

Thank you Keith, I have decided to go ahead with the interview but have had to re-schedule due to a schedule conflit. I am waiting to see what's the soonest time they can reschedule me for. I was under the impression that interviews are conducted for HR restrictions (that is if the application has passed the initial screening) and this is not indicative of an actual opening.
Do you have any tips for the telephone interview? As I mentioned earlier, I am a CS PhD and have not come across much financial mathematics and I certainly need to refresh my mind on the likes of SDE PDE and probabilities. Should I spend more time on preparing for the C++ and algorithmic questions or on maths and finance stuff? My research is in applied machine learning, although this was not mentioned in the job brief, will they ask me ML and Data-mining Q's in a telephone interview? Recently I had an interview which I was asked on assmuptions and types of Hidden Markov Models which I have come across several times but did not know of the top of my head. Has anyone been asked technical and detailed ML Q's like this for quant jobs?

Thank you

 

[Han Solo]

Hi PhDGradNM, can you please share your experience once you'll get through the interview? I will finish my PhD in theoretical physics in about 2-3 months and got lots of doubts of the kind that you've described. Would appreciate a lot. Good luck with your interview man.