Analytical / Attention to Detail Questions & Suggested Answers Analytical and quantitative questions are more common if you’re a Liberal Arts major or if you haven’t had finance, engineering or math experience. Interviewers are trying to assess whether “you can count” – you don’t need to be a math whiz to be a banker, but you do need to be comfortable with numbers and calculations in Excel. So if you haven’t majored in something quantitative or your work experience is all journalism-related, you’ll want to prepare a few examples of your analytical abilities. Even if you have had finance or analytical experience, you’re still likely to be asked about your analytical skills – they want to test your communication abilities and make sure you can express abstract concepts clearly. These questions are also a good chance to bring up any independent study of finance you’ve done, which will help your case once again. 1. I see you’ve done mostly journalism and research internships before. Can you discuss your quantitative skills? You should respond by discussing specific times when you had to analyze numbers and/or use logic. Good examples might include: your personal portfolio, any math/science classes you’ve taken, any type of budgeting process you’ve been through, any type of research you’ve done that involved numbers. 2. In your last internship, you analyzed portfolios and recommended investments to clients. Can you walk me through your thought process for analyzing the returns of a client portfolio? The key is to break everything down into steps and be very specific about what you did. So you might say that “Step 1” was getting a list of when they bought each investment and how much they invested / how many shares they acquired; “Step 2” was finding a list of when they sold each investment, and what they sold them for; and “Step 3” was aggregating this data over the years in-between for each investment to calculate the compound return.
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