Inside Jane Street: CS Student on Strategy & Product Internship, Interview Process & Career Insights

I go to Williams. I'm currently a senior. I'm studying math and computer science. I'm concentrating in Arabic from the Bay Area, California. Last summer, I was working in New York at a trading firm called Jane Street. They do high-frequency trading. My specific role was strategy and product. When I was a freshman here, one of my teammates who was a senior, he graduated and went into this full-time. So I had heard of the role through him. I heard of the company through another Williams alum who I had talked to over the summer of my sophomore year. The application process was I just submitted my resume online with a short cover letter. We then did a phone interview that was about an hour long, and then they had an on-site set of interviews in New York. It was mostly technical, I think. It wasn't like your typical LeetCode-style interview. We weren't doing any programming because my role isn't super programming-heavy. They were more testing your reasoning and your communication skill. As an intern, you spend a lot of your time thinking about the systems at Jane Street and trying to improve them. A lot of your job involves communicating between different teams. A lot of the teams are built around a specific purpose, and your role is to make sure that the teams building a tool can communicate effectively with the teams using the tool and vice versa. In the internship, we had intern housing, so I would wake up probably around 7, cook myself some breakfast, walk to the office. It was about a 10, 15-minute walk. I'd usually get there around 8.30. They had breakfast there, so I'd have a little bit of a snack when I got there. Then you start work around 9 and you leave it around 6. That changes day-to-day, team-to-team. When I headed out, I usually get dinner with some of the other interns around the office somewhere in downtown Manhattan. Then I'd be home, or I'd go to the gym at some point. Maybe I'd go for a run. But the evenings were pretty much free after 6. When I was going into this internship, I didn't have a ton of preconceptions about this company. I didn't know so much about Jane Street. One thing that surprised me was how humble everybody was. I kind of knew from what other people had said that everybody there was really, really smart. And all the full-timers were just really humble, really willing to talk to you. And it never felt like they were looking down on you or thought they were better than you. Definitely, I think that was probably the best part of the internship was that it was pushing me and trying to challenge skills. I think one particular thing is I always considered myself a pretty good communicator, but in a workplace setting, your communication has to be a little bit different and a little bit more clear. And I struggle with that a little bit, especially towards the second half of the summer, trying to communicate effectively. And in those moments, I think the best way to handle it for me was to just ask for direct feedback. It was easiest just to be like, how did you think that meeting went? Or what could I have done better in sending these emails? How do I communicate my points more clearly? Yeah, ahead of my internship, I definitely did recruit for other roles. I recruited most heavily for software engineering. That's the role I'd heard of. I hadn't really heard of trading as much. The process for software engineering was a lot of applications, a lot of resume screens. I think I ended up with about eight or 10 online assessments where they have you code for a certain amount of time. Only one of those ended up turning into an interview and then an offer at another bank in New York City. I think they're both technical in that they test your ability to solve problems. This strategy and product process was much more about your conceptual thinking about how to organize systems and how to design systems. I found those questions much more interesting. I think the typical software engineering interviews are more specifically what's called leet code style interviews, where they have a specific type of problem and you are basically tested on whether or not you know the algorithm that'll solve this in the quickest amount of time. The summer after my freshman year, I went abroad and I did some research that ended up getting published about computer science. It was about beginner coding and how they solve errors compared to chat GPT. I think my sophomore year summer, I spent doing some sort of marketing outreach and web design. That wasn't the greatest internship. To be honest, I think my resume was weaker than most of the other interns I interned with. A lot of them had corporate experience, so I think that would be helpful. I also spent a lot of time, I spent two semesters TAing, so that was helpful, I think. Yeah, I think any class that challenges how you think. Obviously, a lot of the math classes I've taken really forced you to think conceptually and think in a way that organizes around a certain principle. I think abstract algebra was really good for that, but also some non-STEM classes that were really interesting. I think I took this art history class freshman year that was about North African art, and I knew nothing about art history, but just the way of analyzing a piece and thinking about the composition of an art piece was something I hadn't done, and those analytical skills are helpful in whatever way you think about them. I think balance plays the biggest role in my success. It's important to me to do stuff outside of school that isn't necessarily related to what I study, so being on the crew team has been awesome. It's a really good change of pace from whatever I'm doing in the classroom. I also just think taking time out to hang out with your friends, pursue your personal hobbies, like guitar or whatever it may be. It's super important to make sure you stay happy and ready to approach academics with some intensity. I think it's a skill I'm still working on, but the most valuable skill I picked up was probably communication, or at least getting better at communication, and just thinking about how my word choice and the specific composition of how I send things is important and how that saves a bunch of time on the other end of helping people understand what I'm trying to get across. Looking forward after graduation, I definitely want to do more of the actual developing work, so I'm looking more at software engineering-type roles. I think I found it more satisfying to get my hands on the systems themselves and work on the implementation, but I do think there's a really important place for product and product management, and maybe that's down the line in a couple years. That's a tough question. I think going back, I would have maybe tried to remove the stigma around networking. As a freshman, I think I thought of networking as cynical and very soulless, but once I started to do it, it just ended up being talking to some Williams people and asking them if they enjoyed their lives and if they enjoyed their jobs. I think it led to some very honest conversations with some alums, and it helped demystify a lot of these industries that I'd maybe heard about but didn't know so much about.