What does it take to break into quant?

This comes up most from people at less well-known schools, asking how to make the college tag stop mattering, and the honest answer is that it never stops mattering completely, but it matters in fewer places than you probably think. It matters at the door, because the resume screen is a black box: some firms cast a wide net and send online assessments to almost everyone, so you get a shot regardless of school, while others lean hard on pedigree to filter, and in India this is sharper still, since tier 1 colleges get on-campus recruiting and everyone else works LinkedIn and cold outreach. And it matters again at the very end, in a step most people do not even know exists:

after your interviews, when you are in limbo between the final round and the offer, you can still get rejected even if you did amazingly. Passing or failing a round is binary, and if there is not enough room for everyone who passed, they do a stack rank and pick the strongest backgrounds, even over someone who interviewed better. That includes experience, and notably your school too.

— MyAngelKazusa

So "crush the interview and you are in" is not quite true, and what it means in practice is that you cannot afford to be a borderline pass, you have to be clearly strong. Everywhere between those two points, though, your school does not decide how you do, because the interview is about competence and how fast you learn, tested across your C++ knowledge, data structures, math and logic, and how you actually approach a problem, and none of that cares where you studied. The move, then, is to be undeniable on skill. Get to Codeforces Expert or above, and get there fast, because a contest rating is the cleanest proof of raw problem solving and it cannot be faked. Get genuinely good at low-level C++, the modern, concurrency, and performance side of it. Build something real, an order book or a matching engine, and put it on GitHub. And grind the probability and brainteaser puzzles, the Heard on the Street kind, because the math carries as much weight as the code does, and the booklists and quant problems on the site are there to be your spine for all of it. The odds are low, and that is not a reason to skip it, because being clearly strong is simply how you give yourself the best shot, so get genuinely good first and then apply.