Explaining Your Own Research Clearly
How to walk an interviewer through your own past project or research in a way that survives deep follow-up questions, instead of a rehearsed summary that falls apart under scrutiny.
If your CV lists a research project or thesis, expect an interviewer — often someone technical enough to ask a real follow-up question — to ask you to explain it. This is one of the few moments in the interview where you have home-field advantage: it's your own work. Losing that advantage by giving a vague, rehearsed summary that can't survive a single follow-up question is a common and avoidable mistake.
Lead with the question, not the method
Start with what problem you were actually trying to answer, in one plain sentence, before naming any technique: "I wanted to know whether a stock's earnings surprise predicted its return over the next month" reads far better than opening with "I ran a fixed-effects panel regression with a Fama-MacBeth correction." The method is in service of the question — state the question first so the interviewer has a reason to care about the method, then explain the method at whatever depth they ask for.
Be ready to go three levels deep on your own choices: what you tried first, why it didn't work or wasn't good enough, and what you changed. Interviewers often aren't testing whether your project was groundbreaking; they're testing whether you actually understand every decision you made, because a candidate who can't explain why they chose one method over another probably didn't understand it the first time either. If a result surprised you or a result was a null finding, say so — being honest about a project's limitations reads as far more credible than presenting everything as a clean success.
Example
A strong walkthrough: "I was testing whether momentum persisted in small-cap stocks specifically. My first pass used a simple ranking-and-holding approach, but the results were noisy because small-caps trade thinly, so I added a liquidity filter, which changed the result meaningfully — the effect was weaker but more stable. I'd say the honest conclusion was a modest, not dramatic, effect." This survives follow-up questions because every claim is something the candidate actually decided and can defend.
State the question your research answered before the method, and be ready to explain the sequence of decisions you made — what you tried, what didn't work, and why you changed it. Interviewers are testing depth of understanding of your own choices, not the impressiveness of the technique's name.
Don't oversell a null or modest result as a bigger finding than it was. An interviewer who probes and finds the result was overstated will discount everything else on your CV, whereas an honestly modest finding, well explained, builds trust.
Further reading
- Vault Guide to Advanced and Quantitative Finance Interviews