interview woes

I want to erase everything that happened this morning...today was a learning experience, and not a good one.

I got to the Sheraton (near the pru) at 11AM, and went up to 7th floor where my interview was supposed to be held. On the 7th floor, I saw standard hotel rooms in every direction. Something told me that my interview wasn't going to be held in a sketchy hotel room. I took the elevator downstairs and questioned the concierge, who told me that my interview was on the 5th floor and not the 7th floor. So much for secretaries and poorly written emails.

At 11:20, I had been sitting in the conference room for a while and wondering if the secretary had also screwed up the time when a large, portly man walked in. He apologized profusely and explained that he had been on a v. v. important conference call with the head of his company. I nodded politely and told him that his secretary had sent me to the wrong floor by mistake. He responded: She's always like that. She never does anything right. Good grief. I could tell that I wasn't going to enjoy the next fifteen minutes.

A half-finished bowl of milk and cheerios lay on the table, as well as the financial paper my interviewer had been perusing between interviews. His opening question was: How many parameters are in the B-S model? My mind just froze, and I stared at him. I started writing them down on the Sheraton pad in front of me. I had gotten past sigma, time, and delta when he became impatient. I guessed 6 or 7. The answer was 5. This was really horrible, considering that I had actually written a paper on B-S last semester.

The next command was for me to write down the pdf of the binomial distribution. By this point, things were floating around in my head, and I must have looked confused. He looked at my resume and commented that I had taken probability, statistics, and econometrics. I agreed but couldn't produce the stupid equation. He told me to write down the pdf of the normal distribution instead. Of course, I forgot a squared term. So far, I was 0/2. I just cringe when I think about this question.

I get a mini-break when he questions me on my knowledge of Excel and I produce the command VLOOKUP correctly. His comment: You got a point. I'm thinking: Holy crap. This is the worst interview I've ever had. I am so unprepared.

The interview was shorter than usual interviews (I think the interviewer was slightly less than happy), and I bungled my way through credit risk derivatives, CDOs, and ABSs. I thought he was going to have a heart attack when I first told him that I had no idea what an ABS was. He looked incredulous, then I realized that he was talking ab0ut asset-backed securities. At this point, nothing on earth could have saved me. When he was walking me out, I heard him sigh audibly, and it would have been comical if he were sighing at someone else. SIGH.

This interview is going to be stamped in my brain forever. First, it was completely my fault. I didn't realize that it was going to be 100% technical. I thought that it was going to be a general interview, like ones I've had in the past. Apparently the facts that I was going to be interviewing for a position in the quant group and my interviewer had a PhD didn't ring a bell. Even if it wasn't technical, I should have been prepared. There is no excuse for me not knowing the binomial or the normal distribution or any of the other questions that he asked. This is the biggest issue that my parents have with me. I do things half-assedly, without really understanding them. I think I've learned my lesson.

Of course, I wandered around the pru for a while, then took the T back home. The pru station stop is really stupid because there isn't a token vendor, and the stupid token machine is finicky as all hell and doesn't take quarters. There were three tourists, and the machines were spitting their dollar bills back out and mine as well. However, it took my five-dollar bill, so I gave them three tokens in exchange for their quarters. They were going to Park Street and confused, so I told them that I was going to Park Street as well, and we got on the train. The next station stop wasn't Copley. It was Symphony.

Crap. In all of my confusion and anger, I had hopped on the train going in the wrong direction, and I had dragged a few innocent tourists with me. I got off at the Symphony, and they did too. I apologized, and they looked pretty unhappy. I decided to screw it and walk back across the river. I felt even worse now because I had defrauded three unhappy tourists of $1.25 each. On my way back, I was expecting a car to hit me or something else to happen, but nothing did. C'est la vie.