Sheel Shah, Quadeye Intern, Summer 2022
Hello, I’m Sheel Shah. I am writing this on the last day of my
internship at Quadeye (Gurgaon), and it’s the perfect time for me to
reflect on the epic couple of months I’ve had.
The story began in August 2021. Before IAFs of Jane Street/Optiver opened, I didn’t even know ‘quant’ existed as a field. The whole idea of algorithmic trading was enthralling. I knew I wanted to do quant then, especially after I learned that probability/stats were the cruces of the game. I sorted my preference list in descending order of stipend and began preparations, mainly involving going through my probability notes and doing some practice puzzles online. Of course, I did quite some DSA and CS stuff for the tech internships.
Day 1, as you’d expect, was hectic, and I was rather stressed about it. I messed up a bit in the Jane Street interview, which happened early morning, but I managed to do well for Quadeye and landed the internship (ngl, I was super pleased that night). My dad, however, was pissed because I could’ve gone to Microsoft, but now I was going to some random startup.
Quadeye turned out to be anything but a random startup. Their office is in a posh facility in the poshest area of Gurgaon with some of the poshest apartments around, and some really posh people came to work in our building. The office was straight-up sexy. There were slightly over 100 employees, and the 50-60 interns had a bay of their own. I am not sure how Gurgaon is if you want to settle here, but the two months of my internship have been incredible. Except for the week when I was quarantined (thanks to Covid), I roamed and pursued my hobbies every weekend. Being a Mumbaikar, I will choose Mumbai over Gurgaon any day, but Gurgaon surpassed my expectations. During weekdays, all I usually did was catch up with friends and get rest.
“What did you do at QE” I hear you ask. So work picked up pace quick, and two weeks in, I was accustomed to using two monitors, split into six partitions, and working for 10 hours daily. Of course, I took breaks and played TT, so it was more like 7 hours. The people were great, and the mentors/supervisors in my team were particularly incredible (s/o Arsh). Most of my work revolved around data analysis, with some coding/implementation and some math. In the pre-final week, I had this moment when I finally found the flaw in something we had been trying to work on for a few weeks, and it was a glorious feeling when I wrote the code to check my new hypothesis and saw the idea finally working. If full-time work in quant involves doing such math and getting such thrills, I am all in.
So if you’re into math/stats, I think you’ll enjoy quant. I cannot promise anything about other companies, but Quadeye will be fun. I won’t do the normie thing by ending with an inspirational quote, but I wish you the very best.
Thanks for reading, and goodbye - Sheel.