Alex McMurray
If you're a quant or engineering student aspiring to work in finance, chances are high that Jane Street is one of your top destinations. Its interns are notoriously some of the highest paid, with this year's batch expecting to earn $64k in just 11 weeks.
So how do you get in? Most of it's down to hard work and talent, of course, but a good CV definitely sets you off on the right foot. Jane Street's most high profile interns, those shouted out by co-head of tech Yaron Minsky in the yearly 'What the interns have wrought' blog, have a variety of CVs that prove it's not one size fits all.
Intern 1 was lauded for implementing a memoization function in its data platform Datafetcher. He finished this in the first couple of weeks of his internship, and went on to do a number of other things, including writing a style guide for the platform.
His CV fits into the 'no-nonsense' category: plain black and white, top to bottom reading, with a medium amount of detail about his accomplishments across his (already impressive) previous experiences.
The projects section will have likely played a vital role as it indicates his creativity and interest in technology, particularly regarding OCaml, which is the firm's language of choice.
For those afraid to add a bit of character, note that he also includes his interests in hip-hop, cooking and travel.
Intern 2 scaled Jane Street's open source tracing program, Magic-Trace, while maintaining CX quality by introducing a sampling function. He continued working on the program, optimizing its decoding step by as much as 50% (depending on the trace).
His CV, contrastingly, leans more towards the 'graphic design is my passion' side, implementing icons for his GitHub and website, and splitting information across two multicolored columns. That's not to say it's fluffy; the information and accomplishments are, by-and-large, all very useful.
While Intern 1's evidenced more commitment to personal passion projects, Intern 2's CV is defined by competitiveness and collaboration, detailing not only a laundry list of awards to show he can work solo, but also teaching roles to show he can mentor and be part of a team.
A GitHub link is always a welcome addition to a CV, as it provides tangible evidence of your technical skills. Intern 1 has a GitHub too, but you need to click the link to his website first to get to it.
Intern 3 improved the efficiency of Jane Street's QuickCheck tool by implementing new syntax. After completing that task, he also worked on implementing bisimulation tests into the program.
His CV is something of a middle ground between 1 and 2. It's a little more colourful and eye pleasing than the former, but far less dense than the latter. In fact, it's the least dense of the three, limiting itself to just one line to sum up each previous experience. It's proof that you don't need to pump your CV up with hot air to look impressive.
While the others inject a bit more personality in their CV, intern 3 saves that for his website. He starts by saying "I run on tea and Haskell," and mentions his Erdős number (think six degrees of Kevin Bacon but with a Hungarian mathematician).
There are a number of other, more specific tweaks that you can make to optimize your CV. You can check these out in our definitive guide to an engineering CV in banking.
Source: eFinancialCareers
Original content:
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