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)
Accepted offer
Positive experience
Average interview
Application
I applied through university. I interviewed at Optiver (Chicago, IL) in Sept 2017
Interview
Subscribe my cv in an job fair, did the math quiz and series quiz just at the fair. Second round is a phone interview with behavioral questions and go through cv, then technical interview, mainly brain teaser and some card game. Onsite is an tech interview and behavioral all over again.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
What is the five most important characteristics you believe Optiver employees share?
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.