The Project-Defence Round
Everything in this course converges on one interview format. Systematic funds rarely hand candidates a flawed backtest to critique; what they reliably do is take the candidate's own project (a thesis, a Kaggle entry, a personal strategy, a previous job's research) and interrogate it, follow-up by follow-up, until they find the assumption the candidate cannot defend. The round tests validation knowledge in the only way that cannot be memorised: applied to work you claim as yours.
How the interrogation runs
The structure is an escalation. It starts open ("walk me through the project"), narrows to methodology ("how did you validate it?"), then drills wherever your answers expose surface area: how you split the data, what you did about overlapping labels, how many things you tried, why you believe the effect is real, what would have made you abandon it. Each answer determines the next question, and the interviewer is listening less for the right technique than for whether you know the weaknesses of your own work.
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