Turning Down An Offer From A Bank (Citi/PJT/Laz/BAML) To Pursue Career As A Quant?

0 and 0. Recent grad with a long-term internship offer

TC 0?

This did cross my mind. With a MS would my competitiveness be low end?

Probably doesn’t matter. Problem solving ability is much more important

Thanks for your response. I've always said to myself I didn't want a quant role at a bank because I knew it wasn't exciting and the trajectory was not super appealing. May I ask what your background is. In terms of education, math & coding proficiency? Im in the top 10% of my class at a top UK school studying a physical science degree. Not sure if that qualifies or can allow you to estimate if I am on the right level. If I had to characterise myself I would say I am someone who does genuinely enjoy learning. I have strong interest in math and machine learning, which is what I would specialise my masters in. What role are you transitioning to at FAANG and how transferable is your skill set? I am assuming you're US based?

Hey, My education is a combined BS in computer science and MS in computer science (artificial intelligence) from a US engineering school (one of: MIT/Stanford). In hindsight I should have done my undergrad in math/stats so I can understand the fundamentals behind machine learning better. But oh well. My coding is pretty solid, math is relatively weaker as compare to a math/stats/physics person. Other than that I had some research experience in school, but no papers or anything. And yeah I’m based in the US. Different from you, I don’t really care for math that much. I mean it’s okay and I’ll learn it, but it’s not my passion at all. I just studied AI because of the hype and faster way to make money compared to being a doctor/lawyer/etc. I’ll be a software engineer on a machine learning team in FAANG. The interviews are just some typical Leetcode style technical interviews for SWE + a machine learning round. I would say it’s transferable, but there’s more emphasis on Leetcode for FAANG. For my bank job, they just ask some Leetcode easy level problems (well I sort of had connections from school so I think the interview was meant to be easy), but FAANG is exclusively medium/hards. The only thing I am probably missing out on at a bank is knowing engineering best practices. Like we have version control and code reviews of course, but most ppl on my team are from academia so they don’t really have the best coding abilities (though they’re smart in other respects). And also we don’t have an engineering-first culture at the bank. At the end of the day, we are not front office, as much as we try to lie to ourselves. We’re just a support roles for the investment bankers and that’s it. Therefore, not much room for career growth, etc. Our team (AI research and development) does get a lot of investment from the firm (our budget is huge) and our salaries are very high for a back office role. But still... not the optimal place to be (for a person in my shoes)

Thank you for the advice

Can you explain why? I'm curious.

Would like to know why to avoid a bank as well

Oddly, there seems to be a fair amount of hires to quant funds and even prop shops through their grad programmes (seems quite frequent here in the UK)

Maybe they get hired as a software engineer? Or their label is 'quant', but the work is not the same as a PhD level quant. Maybe their job is to maintain infrastructure, etc.

Very true. I am probably going to take the internship

Traditional investment banking, so working with analysts on M&A models, LBOs, IPOs, Powerpoints for pitches etc etc

Sounds like a decent job unless you want a completely different career