Some people seem to think I care about their relationship with God. I don't, and nor do the people who might hire you.

Your CV is a list of things for someone to hire you, so the world can be divided into a few overlapping sets.
1: People of a different, hostile religion. That is pretty much everyone, even if you belong to a relatively common sect.

2: People of a similar religion.
Those who care about religion often are quite specific in what they believe, and can have quite negative views about people who "aren't really like us".

3: The tiny set of people who share your exact views.
I've asked religious people about this, and they say they'd be quite offended if someone thought they would hire them because of a shared religion.

4: People who don't care.
You've just wasted space that could be used for something useful.

Not only do P&D not care about your religion, but our contracts with large firms actually forbid us from telling them because they don't want to be sued. The logic being that you can't claim discrimination if the employer doesn't know.

You are a leader.

I know this because your CV says so, and I know you would not lie to me. But do I believe you ? Do I care ?

If your current job involves telling people what to do then that is leadership, and of a rare and precious kind. Leading and managing quants is like herding cats, and if you an do that you have earned my respect.

But...

If you are at entry level, I get worried, and occasionally entertained by claims of "leadership". It is clear that some careers advisers push this concept, and perhaps in some industries it looks good, but not in banking and certainly not to me.

Some people have led men in battle, or at least in hazardous and unpleasant conditions. That's pretty rare in American and British quants, but in countries fuckwitted enough to still do conscription, it is a plausible way to have learned leadership.

Although I'm some dumb ass pimp, decades ago I got some sort of education, and remember what it was like to be a student and try to get my classmates to cooperate in any task.

But I have to say I apply a discount factor to "leadership" gained in university clubs. A bigger discount if the "L" word is actually used.

Leadership in a summer or part time job is extremely hard to express without looking like you are bullshitting on a grand scale, and sadly most people fail at least partly on this, wasting space that could be used for something useful (and believable).

Part of leadership is the ability to work without someone holding your hand, telling what to do and how to do it. This is a significant factor in why there is a premium for PhDs even when the stuff they study is entirely unrelated to investment banking.

Up to Masters level you are mostly a taught person, and so I and your hiring manager are uncertain whether you can work on your own, but at the same time not too much on your own.

Leadership in this context means being able to lead yourself, and maybe others will follow. If like me you've actually had leadership training, then you will know that you can take charge of a rabble sometimes merely by clearly expressing a reasonable course of action.

The other problem with the L word is that without care you look as if you are arrogant. The idea that you will be "difficult to manage", or worse "arrogant", can hurt your cances of getting a job, and is expressed to me by managers as a reason they are reluctant to hire an otherwise good candidate.

Quanting is not the only career option if you are good with maths and computers.

A good process outline is to change variables through a range and see how sensitive your conclusion is to them. If you haven't done at least half of these, of something like them, then the chances that you've made a bad decision are worryingly high.

Quant careers can be very lucrative and interesting, but not for everyone, and you need to evaluate your chances of actually enjoying it This is not an exhaustive list of course, you have personal preferences and you've made assumptions, and as we have seen for the last year assumptions can really go badly wrong.

Questions
For instance if quanting paid the same as teaching, would you prefer that ?

If you knew for a fact that at 40, you'd have to leave this line of work ?

If you believed you'd only ever work in small unknown firms ? That is I believe now a much more probable event.

If the ratio of maths to IT was 1:50 ? What value could you cope with as a long term position ?

You'd have to work in some shit place like Birmingham or Frankfurt ? Are you flexible on location ?

What if you maximum pay was known to you in advance, and was (say) 200K ?

Would you work for a year free to get into quant finance ?