okay so i just got through the bloomberg new grad loop and i want to post this because basically everything i read before was either outdated or written by someone who clearly had a finance degree and assumed you did too. i don't. CS degree, no fin econ minor, barely know what a bond is.
how to prep if you're in the same boat:
coding rounds. this is the meat of it. bloomberg new grad interviews are heavily leetcode-flavored, medium difficulty, occasionally hard. data structures and algorithms is the whole game. graphs, trees, dynamic programming, string manipulation. i did about 6 weeks of daily practice. neetcode roadmap, focused on medium problems. don't skip graphs, i got a graph question in my actual interview.
the c++ question. i don't have c++ experience (java background) and people made this sound terrifying. it came up exactly once in conversation, not as a separate round. they asked if i'd used it, i said no but i'm comfortable picking up new languages, and they moved on. for a 2025 new grad cohort i don't think it's a dealbreaker if your other fundamentals are solid. earlier posts on here freaked me out about this unnecessarily.
behavioral. bloomberg does ask behavioral questions even at new grad level. not super deep, more like: tell me about a group project that had conflict, tell me about a time you failed at something technical. have two or three real stories. don't give generic "i worked hard and we succeeded" answers, they'll probe.
finance knowledge. they did not ask me to explain derivatives. they did NOT require me to know financial products. that said, bloomberg's whole business is financial data infrastructure, so i did spend a weekend reading about what a bloomberg terminal is and why it exists. felt like showing i cared enough to learn the context.
total process: campus career fair application, OA, then virtual onsite with 3 rounds. got an offer about 3 weeks after onsite. compensation was solid for new grad nyc, in the 170-185k total comp range from what i can tell comparing with classmates.