I applied through college or university. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Optiver (London, England)
Interview
Applied through the website after attending a company presentation at University. HR was helpful. We communicated by email and got a request to attend a numerical test session. Test was in London at a rather comfy hotel on a weekday.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Went through the first round numerical tests. The first round comprised of 3 separate numerical tests. The first round was the standard 80 mental arithmetic questions in 8 minutes. Around half the cohort got flushed there. 2nd round was numerical sequences, 26 in 30 minutes, final round was again mental arithmetic, 30 in 10 minutes, I think. First and third rounds were easy, but I found the second round to be difficult. Have an idea on how to solve numerical sequences before turning up.
spent about 1.5 months pretty much purely dedicated to preparing for interviews for all the pre-penultimate programs (Optiver, IMC, JS, SIG, Citadel, etc). I used these resources:
Green book (Really good starter but I got bored of it after a few weeks)
EverythingQuant (Went through literally every single interview prep question, went through the interview guides, and completed the probability course just to make sure I covered all bases)
Briefly read through this guide
Watched coding Jesus in my spare time (not sure if this helped directly lmao but he’s a great creator and very informative)
Mental math test, beat the odds, online puzzle like games etc online, brain teasers during physical interview and a behavioral interview where they want to assess how competitive and assertive you are.
OA was weird and hard. there was only three sections (i think) this year compared to 5 last year. questions are weird and I don't know how they can judge your ability base on that.
