Insurance Strats Summer Internship

Status
Intern at
Group/Division/Type
GSAM Insurance Strats
City
New York
Interviewed
May 2013
Overall experience
Positive
Difficulty
Average

General Interview Information

Outcome
No Offer
Interview Source
College / University / On Campus Recruiting
Length of Process
Less than 1 month

Interview Details

What did the interview consist of?
Phone Interview
1 on 1 Interview
Please describe the interview / hiring process.
Phone Interview step:
30 mins phone interview. Let me briefly go through my resume for 5 mins or less, introduced their department (GSAM Insurance Department) for 5 mins or less, then technical questions.
Q1: The variance of a portfolio
Q2: The range of a swap rate

Superday:
5 interviewers, 30 mins each. All briefly went through my resume for 5 mins or less, then technical questions.
The questions are based on resume, they looked at my resume, and pull out some questions according to the experience they are interested in.

Interviewer 1 (a VP holding Masters degree with 16 years work experience):
Q1: Given duration, calculate portfolio value change (in a real-world setting). You'll need to identify what's the company's asset and liability, and they have different size and duration
Q2: Would the company result a profit or loss given an interest rate change
Q3: Explain the effect of interest rate's effect on option

Interviewer 2 (an Associate holding Masters degree with 5 years work experience):
Q1: What is covariance stationary in time series, use equation to explain
Q2: Calculate the premium of a limited pay term life insurance
Q3: Discussed many issues in linear regression, including auto-correlation etc

Interviewer 3 (a MD holding Ph.D in Physics at Harvard with 8 years work experience):
We discussed for about 10 mins on one of my previous TA experience, that's why he only had time to ask 1 question.
Q1: Given a random number generator that generate 1,2,3,4,5 only, produce a generator that generate 1,2,3,4,5,6,7. And expected value of the steps taken for the generator to generate a number.

Interviewer 4 (a Strategist(maybe that's how they call analyst in this dept) holding Ph.D in Physics at CalTech with 2 years work experience):
Q1: What's VaR
Q2: 1000 coins, 999 fair, 1 heads for both sides. Pick a random 1, toss for 10 times, ends up they are all heads, what's the probability that this picked one is the unfair one.
Q3: Basically this is a binomial tree discount question, but he stated that in a very-strange-to-me setting, which made me asked him to state again before finally knew what he was asking

Interviewer 5 (a don't-know-his-title holding Ph.D in FE/Math at Princeton with 7 years work experience):
Q1: Given a random generator that generate from (0,1) interval, don't use pole coordinate system, generator a point in a circle. And it's expected times to use the generator to generate one.
Q2: A P&C insurance company has Poisson Dist of claim number and Normal Dist with only positive half of claim size. What's the total claim amount.
Overall Company Rankings
Blurred content of Overall Company Rankings Blurred content of Overall Company Rankings

Want Access to these Goldman Sachs Overall Company Rankings?

  • Free 1 month access by adding just 1 salary datapoint here
  • REAL salary bonus data across 1,000+ companies
  • Plus free 1 month access to 10,000+ interview insights

Was this interview insight helpful?

How many stars would you give to this interview insight?

No votes have been submitted yet.

Other Interview Data

Associate (Vice President)
Goldman Sachs, CHICAGO, 2016
Trader (Vice President)
HSBC, New York, 2022
Vp (Vice President)
Morgan Stanley, New York, 2021
Vp (Vice President)
Morgan Stanley, New York, 2021
Quantitative Strategist (Vice President)
Morgan Stanley, NA, 2020

Unlock WSO Database

1 month free. Add your own pay data.