Interview

Real Interview Questions

Investment Banking (Merger & Acquisition)

1. Walk me through your resume by date.
2. What is your current intern responsibility?
3. If I throw you a financial statement, how do you know whether it is a healthy firm?
4. Have you done anything with cash flow projection?

Consumer Risk Modeling and Analytics

1. Talk about your current project.
2. How do you prioritize multi tasks?
3. What is your experience with SAS?

Risk Management

1. What is the five inputs of BS model?
2. Define credit risk?
3. Draw payoff function for selling a put.
4. Name all interest rate derivatives you know except for cap and floor.
5. What is the limitation of CAPM?
6. The advantages and disadvantages of BS model.
7. What is the difference between CAPM and APT?
8. How many pricing methods do you know?
9. Talk about a project you did in Excel VBA and advanced functions.
10. Write down some codes in Matlab
11. Tell me a situation when you try to attain an objective but failed over and over again. For example, first time skiing.
12. Why study your major?
13. In your current internship, who do you report to?
14. Do you care about/follow the market? Can you describe some cases happened in the market recently?
15. How do you think about this company, this group, why choose it?
16. Describe one of your teamwork experiences. How do you overcome the difficulties?

Investment Operations

1. What if there is a tough/difficulty person in your team?
2. Where do you see yourself in 5 years?
3. Why study economics? Why Iowa State? Why not finance or business school?
4. Talk about your recent and previous internship.
5. Is there anything we did not talk about and you want to add?
6. Sophisticated education as a PhD candidate, talk about your PhD projects.
7. Talk about your software skills.
8. What do you want to do with this position, what is your expectation, why this particular position? Give a number of you salary expectation.
9. Criticism, improvement, comment, description of you by previous boss.
10. How to overcome obstacles?
11. Rate your skills in VBA one to five.
12. Do you prefer work individually or teamwork?

Fixed Income (High Yield)

1. Self introduction
2. Strength and weakness
3. Order a bunch of accounting terms used to calculate EBITA by their actual sequence as appearing in a financial statement
4. Teamwork, like and dislike
5. How your former colleague will say about you?
6. What working environment do you prefer, cube or open floor plan?
7. How to prioritize multitasks? What to do if you are bored by routine jobs?
8. Why this company, why high yield, what do you want to do here?
9. Tell me about your teaching experience, like and dislike. What do you do to improve students' average test scores?
10. What is your hobby? What do you do when not working?
11. After graduation, stay US or go back to home country?
12. What makes you distinguish from others for this job?
13. What magazines (e.g., Wall Street Journal, Economist) do you read daily? Do you follow the market?
14. What is fundamental analysis, e.g., in airline industry?
15. What would you do instead if not selected for this position?
16. What did you do that result in the efficiency improvement as claimed in your resume?
17. What is your understanding about high yield?

Other Questions I have heard of

1. How do you multitask when boss throw at you some ad-hoc assignment with deadline?
2. How do you respond to random requirements from managers in other groups?
3. What is duration? How is it calculated?
4. Term structure? Yield curves shapes and how do you make money on the various ones?
5. What is the present value curve look like in USA now?
6. Tell me some about the different bonds you know about. What about their prices with respect to each other? (plain vanilla/convertible/callable)
7. If interest rate goes up/down, what would you do with a bond that is presently variable in coupon rate that has a convert option to a fixed coupon bond?
8. Show me how to do a DCF?
9. Your view on the fixed income global market.

Your Attitude/Personality in Interview

• Don't laugh. Smile without sound, and nod. Try to follow the interviewer's idea flow and responds properly. He/She will detect immediately if you let your mind drift away, given that you are smiling and nodding like a robot.
• Don't be defensive; stop fighting back for everything the interview said which you do not agree with.
• Talk like you are smart. "I do not know this, but based on basic concepts. This should be..." When the interviewer asks something you are not familiar with, you should try to analyze the question based on relevant courses, projects and other experiences. The answer should be developed from general and larger concepts. Details are listed in a logic way. Finally, the results must be doable, simple, and reasonable (not theoretical).
• Thank you + name. Thank you very much a billion times! Thank you, Emma. Which is better?