By Ellen Welford
First of all, congratulations if you have made it to interview!
I arrived on a Tuesday evening, and I found out that my first interview was on the Wednesday at 11:50 am. My first interview was the management interview and was based entirely around a piece of pre-reading on reasons for the gender pay gap. It was about 15 pages long, and included tables and graphs, and we had 15 minutes to read and absorb. The interviewers then proceeded to ask me questions based on this text, which makes it quite hard to report, but this is the general gist, so you get some sort of an idea:
1. What are some of the key reasons outlined in the text as to why women are paid less than men?
2. (They then gave me a table with new data) Which of your stated reasons is portrayed most closely in this table?
3. Which solutions to the problem does the article suggest?
4. How likely to overcome the pay gap problem would introducing better childcare be? (in the text it had arguments against this, with an example from Denmark).
5. They then read me a few statistics from other texts which I had not seen and asked me to comment on them with respect to the given text.
My second interview was the economics interview and was purely maths based. This was later the same day, at 3pm. This should give a general idea on some of the questions they asked:
1. There are three portfolios, A, B, and C, and three states of economy, high (H), medium (M) and low (L). In each of these states, portfolio A yields 15%, 11% and 7%. B yields 14%, 9% and 2%. C yields 9%, 12% and 15%. Draw this information into a table.
2. Say I invested my money 50/50 in portfolios A and B, what would be my return at each state of the economy?
3. What is my expected return if all three states are equally likely?
4. What is my return in all 3 states if I invest 50/50 in portfolios B and C?
5. What is my expected return, if again all three states of economy are equally likely?
6. Work out the standard deviation of the outcomes for 50/50 in A and B. (side note - I had to have a lot of assistance with this one)
7. Would you rather invest 50/50 in A and B, or B and C? Why?
8. Draw the graph of f(x)=ln(x).
9. What is the derivative of lnx? Derivative of x5?
10. What are the maximum and minimum values of f(x)=x2 between -1 and 1?
11. What are the max and min values of f(x)=x2 between -infinity and +infinity?
12. A watch face shows 3:15. What is the angle between the hands?
13. A sequence exists such that an = 1/n. Where does this sequence converge?
14. The final question I messed up so badly that I can’t even remember what it was exactly. They gave me a super long formula and asked me to work out a value of something from it. There were so many symbols that I had never seen before!