Quantitative Finance – Analytics University

Recently I spoke with Dinesh Nayak about his journey from being an IT professional to a Risk modelling quant. I asked him a couple of questions about his background and how he managed to get into risk modelling. Hope this is helpful to some of you that are interested to switch career to Credit risk modelling. Until recently Dinesh worked as an IT Engineer for a service based IT company. After hearing from a friend about career in Risk Modelling, he started exploring career opportunities in this field. He contacted me some time last year (in Nov). I advised him to focus on the basics and complete my credit risk modelling course. He sincerely did the course and also clarified his doubts over a couple of calls with me. It gives me pleasure to say that he has managed to clear interviews at so many places (top notch companies such as KPMG, JPMC, EY). Enjoy the below (rather short) conversation with Dinesh. For anything, reach out to me over email. 1- Tell us about your education and career journey I am a Btech Graduate in Mechanical Engineering. I have done my BTech from a Tier - III college in India. I have 5.5 years of experience in industry. Currently I am working as an Analyst in Wells Fargo. My previous employer is TCS. 2- What motivated you to get interested in Risk modelling? It was a friend who told me about Risk Modelling. It was really interesting to know how the bank is mitigating different kind of risk. That motivated me to get into Risk modelling as my work will have direct impact to the bank.3- What challenges did you face in the interview preparation?As I come from different background , initially I was facing challenges in statistics part. Statistics is a huge area and many captive banks were driving deep into statistics.4- Can you share a few technical questions you were asked in the interview? Below are the few questions asked in interview 1. What model would you use if you have continuous data and you want to forecast things? 2. How would you validate the model? 3. What is multicollinearity? 4. What is PSI? 5. How will you handle overfitting of model? 6. What tests would you run to find whether two samples are same or not? 7. What is Rsquare? 8. What all functions have you used while building a model? 9. How will you read AUCROC curve? 5- What questions were asked to you in the HR and Managerial round?In HR and Managerial round they were asking basic questions like my aspiration, reason for job change, my strength and weaknesses6- What suggestions would you like to give to those interested in getting into a career in risk modelling? I will suggest them to learn any of the model and its framework. Try and finish some of the projects which will give a simulation of what a project looks like in realtime. Try to be clear of basics of Risk Modelling. Learn any of the programming language (SAS or Python)

Tag: Quantitative Finance

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