This is what it takes to get a $64k Jane Street internship

Secretive electronic trading firm Jane Street is renowned for the massive $1.4m per head its full-time employees are paid, but the firm's internships can be lucrative too; we've reported that intern classes of previous years have earned $64k over an 11-week period. Job listings for its internships don't ask for specific experiences, financial services knowledge or specific university subjects. Instead, Jane Street says it is "more interested in how you think and learn than what you currently know." But how true is that, really?

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We've analyzed professional profiles of 72 separate students, primarily in the US, who have announced they are interning at Jane Street this year. We've looked at what they're studying, where they're studying it, and what job experience they have prior to joining the firm. It has a few preferences, but Jane Street - which didn't comment for this article - seems to stay true to its principals.

What universities does Jane Street prefer for its interns?

Jane Street is thought to do extensive Campus Recruiting across a list of target universities and will primarily hire its intern class from those schools. The list might be larger than you think; the 72 interns we looked at came from a total of 37 different universities. While MIT is the most popular school for Jane Street full-time staff and alumni alike, the school was home to just one of the 72 interns we've seen for this year's cohort. The University of Waterloo, which produces a large amount of Jane Street interns via its Co-Op program, produced just one of these interns, too.

Instead, the most popular university among these interns was Stanford, home to six interns, followed by the University of Chicago with five. Tied for third were Berkeley and Harvard, which each produced four interns. Nine different schools produced three interns, including Cambridge and Yale. 

There were also some glaring omissions, however, including Oxford. The English school produced none of these interns, despite being the second most popular university in Europe for Jane Street full-time employees.

How does this compare to Jane Street's competitors? Citadel Securities and sister hedge fund Citadel accepted over 300 interns from 80+ global universities, implying an average of almost 4 students per school. 

What subject should I study to get a Jane Street internship?

Far and away the most popular subject among these incoming Jane Street interns was computer science, which was studied in some form by 47 of 70 interns. Mathematics, the second most popular, was studied by 24 interns and was the most popular subject for interns working in quantitative research. In many cases, both mathematics and computer science were studied together, usually as a combined bachelor's degree. No other individual subject was studied by more than six people, although they almost all had some sort of technical component, like data science, electrical engineering or statistics. 

This is expected of top players in the space. Roughly 80% of Citadel and Citadel Securities' class studied mathematics and/or computer science as well.

Young electronic trading firms like Jane Street are thought to prefer younger undergraduates to PhDs, and this intern sample overwhelmingly reflects that. Just one of the 72 was studying for a PhD and was going for an FPGA internship, which is a more specialist technical role in which PhDs are far more common. 

Master's students were similarly uncommon, making up just 13 of the 72. Nine of those interns studied computer science. One studied mathematics. Two interns studied both. Financial mathematics master's courses (MFEs) were surprisingly infrequent; just one intern was taking the course, while another undergraduate student took an MFE bootcamp at Baruch.

Some interns also studied less technical topics. Four studied either business or finance, but all did so in combination with mathematics or computer science. Two interns studied philosophy in addition to a STEM subject, going into software engineering and product roles respectively.

Note, however, that Jane Street staff have previously said the modules you study can matter more than your broader degree. Choose wisely.

What internships do I need to get into Jane Street?

It's the work experience profile of Jane Street interns where things get really interesting. The vast majority have internships, some having as many as five, but they're across an expansive range of companies and industries. The 72 students collectively interned at over 132 companies prior to joining Jane Street. Just 15 of those companies employed more than one intern. 

The most popular company was another algorithmic trading firm, Optiver, at which five of Jane Street's incoming students interned. The PhD intern also briefly worked there full-time as a graduate before returning to school for his PhD. Other financial services firms include Citadel Securities, JPMorgan, Bridgewater Associates and Five Rings, which each previously employed two of the 72 interns.

Hedge funds said at last year's Quant Strats conference that finance is attracting students who were previously applying to big tech; some of those students are turning up at Jane Street. Meta and Amazon each respectively employed three of the incoming Jane Street interns, as did Singapore/LA-based tech giant TikTok, and video game developer Roblox. One intern worked at both X (formerly Twitter) and accompanying generative AI firm XAI. 

Others previously interned at startups; fintech, AI, or otherwise. One worked for military technology firm Palantir. Two of the 72 previously interned at NASA. Another quant trading intern worked on data science for the Council on Foreign Relations, a non-partisan US think tank. It seems as though what you do is more important to Jane Street than where exactly you're doing it. 

What other jobs will get me a job at Jane Street?

Rather than intern at a startup, six incoming Jane Street interns founded their own. One founded Forge, a rocket engine hardware procurement firm backed by Y-Combinator that raised $2.1m in seed funding last year. Another founded Spore Financial, a borderless payment fintech similar to the likes of Wise.

Working as a research assistant for your university, or another one, was also a common trend. Machine learning projects were the most popular among interns taking this route.

If you've spent your summer working at McDonald's and think there's no hope for you, there might well be. One intern spent his summer as a team member of Shake Shack; another was a hostess at Ted's Montana Grill. The Shake Shack employee also interned at two firms, including hedge fund Millennium before joining Jane Street, so don't expect to go straight from one to the other.

How else can I impress Jane Street when applying for internships?

Your extracurricular activity at university can go a long way. Many interns served as executives of university societies like the Carnegie Mellon Competitive Programming club, the UNC Chapel Hill Poker Club and the Northeastern University Math Club. The latter of the three was able to secure the Jane Street job with no prior internships, serving as a teaching assistant for the school's course on compiler design. 

Jane Street and many other trading firms run 'insight days' and other student events. Six interns attended one ran by Jane Street specifically, with more attending events ran by the likes of Citadel Securities and D.E. Shaw. One female student previously worked at Hudson River trading for its 'Women's Winternship' program. Another worked as a mathematics tutor for Jane Street's Academy of Math and Programming (AMP), ran for high-school graduates.

Other interesting backgrounds include a committee member of the international olympiad of informatics (Olympiad champions often find their way to Jane Street). Some students have sporting backgrounds, like being a table tennis coach or a team member of the UCLA Spikeball Club. Another was in the top 3% of a low-latency AI programming competition on CodinGame which had 200,000 competitors. 

If you've got a similar profile to any of these 72 students, you could find yourself being invited to a Jane Street interview. You can prep for that by looking at some of Jane Street's most confounding questions here.

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