I was contacted by a recruiter in early September, after applying through my college job fair. We had a nice, pleasant interaction over email. She scheduled a phone interview with a general technical interviewer who asked about my prior experiences, why I do computer science, and how to implement a hash table in the most general sense. All went well and I was called again to discuss tech in more detail. I was asked to implement binary searching and a shuffle-sort algorithm, but most of the focus was again (pleasantly) on me and the person behind the code, not the code itself.

After that, I had an onsite interview where they wined and dined all day, giving me an all-encompassing view over what they do and how they do it. Tours, meals, and five hours of interviews gave me a pretty good idea about what they wanted and how they wanted it. I think my lack of financial experience didn't matter, despite the financial nature of SIG. It was a good process with lots of check ins and conversations.

It was a cool data parsing problem where you took a text file data set and converted it to a usable data structure that was able to answer questions about ranges of data.

It also required me to work with huge text files, with entries up to 1 million lines long.