Each year, Jane Street shouts out a number of projects that its interns worked on in its ‘What the interns have wrought’ blog post from CTO Yaron Minsky. These top interns usually come from a variety of schools and have interned at various different firms. It’s no different this year, but multiple of these elite interns share a rather niche piece of experience.
Leo Gagnon and Evan Thompson both interned at Jane Street as software engineers this year. They’re both MIT students and have both worked at the university’s computer science and artificial intelligence laboratory (CSAIL). The lab employs undergraduate students as researchers through an undergraduate research opportunities program (UROP).
MIT is the most popular university among former Jane Street interns. And UROP’s are very common among MIT students; 90% of students in MIT’s department of electrical engineering and computer science do one, but not all do so at CSAIL. One student at a top UK university that runs a similar program told us “basically everyone gets approved for the scheme, but not everyone gets the funding approved.”
If you want a place on a UROP at any university, you’ll have to get a professor conducting research to sponsor you. The best courses can be competitive; a member of Imperial College London’s Subreddit said last year that some UROPs have 30-40 applicants for just 1-2 places and said you should “have really good grades” and good subject expertise for the area of research.
The student told us that he was ghosted for an in-demand research opportunity. Older forums for MIT suggest this is a common occurrence; one MIT student said it took them 12 emails to researchers just to secure an interview.
What are the top UROPs in CSAIL? It depends on the area you want to work in. Gagnon’s research at CSAIL involved building a “Python‑level language intended for database usage;” Jane Street tasked him with expanding the capabilities of its internal SQL dialect.
Thompson, meanwhile, worked “in the Algorithmic Design Group on ML methods for 3D shape generation and reconstruction” at CSAIL. At Jane Street, he developed a tool for its Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) system, which affects the visual presentation of trader displays.
Not all UROPs are paid, but they might pay dividends if it can help you get into Jane Street. The trading firm is paying its next cohort of US interns $5.8k per week
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