MIT vs. Princeton vs. Yale undergrad for quant hedge fund
Hi all,
I am a current high school senior choosing between attending MIT, Princeton, or Yale for my undergrad. My current goal throughout and post undergrad is to secure a summer internship at one of the big NYC quant hedge funds (Jane Street, D.E. Shaw, Two Sigma) and hopefully transition into a full-time offer after graduating. Out of my three choices, which college would be most conducive to this kind of career path, and what majors and activities specific to this college choice would be most conducive to this kind of career path? To a lesser degree, which college would provide the most versatility if I decide to deviate from this career path and do something else within STEM? I am mainly choosing between MIT and Princeton and have knocked Yale out of the equation, but if Yale has some low-key advantages that I don't yet know about, then I am willing to reconsider it.
I should add that at any of these colleges, I intend to major in math or any interdisciplinary subject that is primarily math. I am also considering ORFE at Princeton.
I would greatly appreciate any advice. Thanks for your help!
MIT. Major in anything, learn how to program. Avoid doing pure CS - you'll be typecast.
PS. I'd only pick D.E. Shaw of these 3 - definitely avoid Jane Street since that would put you on the HFT track and that's not really finance.
PPS. Also, instead of taking an official internship, try to find a spot on a smaller PM team - you will get more exposure to actual alpha generation.
It’s a great place to work, but it’s not a good place to learn, especially at the beginning of your career. IMHO, of course, but I don’t think people that work there get a broad enough exposure since it’s more of a layer setup. At other places you get to see the full life cycle of a portfolio which is very valuable. PS. I have never worked there myself and simply formed my opinion based on the people I’ve interviewed or spoken too
Could you speak a little bit more to this? I've been considering putting myself in the interview process there.
Two Sigma is fully systematic so research is where the $ is. The trading/PM side of two sigma is just operations. Becoming a PM is not the goal of a place like Two Sigma. Those with the title of portfolio manager oversee the portfolio as well as the research but the research is the key aspect. When doing quant research, you have to test how your ideas work given the full systematic strategy so you do still get a full picture of how the strategy you support works. Need to determine correlation to other factors, exposures, etc. so I don't think what you are saying is true. Being a "trader" at two sigma is not a sought after position
It's a very efficient model and no single employee is irreplaceable and no single person (except for the PMs) is actually able to grasp the big picture (so the IP leakage is well contained). Some funds with that structure have realized that researchers are fungible and run it as a sweatshop (e.g. WQ) while some have not.
My point is that if you are planning to stay at TwoSigma for the rest of your career, you have nothing to worry about as long as you don't get fired and TwoSigma sticks around. Your career progression is rather limited from junior researcher to senior researcher. While on that ladder, you are removed from whatever PnL your alpha is producing and you have limited leverage to improve the situation.On the other hand, if you go to another shop and work for a smaller, "do it all" PM group, you will get exposure to all aspects of extracting alpha, from idea generation to fine-tuning execution. You also get to interact with the PM directly most of the time, which is a massive learning opportunity early in your career. With that kinda of experience, you can at some point hang your own shingle if you have the stomach for it, join a multi-manager shop as a PM or keep doing what you're doing.
Again, I'll repeat myself - if you love the place and want to stay there (like RenTechies tend to, for example), it's not an issue. However, you can work in there for years and never understand the full pipeline in detail which becomes a problem when you actually need to go and find another job.
Hi, current senior at MIT studying computer science here. I have some inherent bias, but I'll give it to you straight from my perspective. To give a little more background on myself, I've interviewed/interned with a few quant places, but have come to focus much more on fundamental/value investing as my interests and understanding of investing has progressed through college. That being said, I have several friends working at DE Shaw/Jane Street/Two Sigma/AQR etc.
For your stated interest of working in quant, MIT is hands down the best of the three. This is for many reasons. First, any quant firm you'd ever be interested in aggressively recruits from MIT. Second, an MIT education in a technical subject, if taken seriously, will prepare you to do very well in a quant role. Third, quant is very much part of the finance culture at MIT. 80% of people pursuing careers in finance are looking for quant roles, and only about 20% are like me and pursuing a corporate finance/fundamentals role (value HF, IB, PE, etc.).
That being said, simply going to MIT is just the beginning of the journey in regards to landing a buy-side quant role out of college. Quant interviews are really tough. They generally expect that you have a solid grasp of the principles introduced in MIT's intro probability class (https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mathematics/18-440-probability-and-random-v…) and often times will expect you to have coding literacy (usually Python or R, but sometimes C++ for more high frequency stuff). Further, because so many people at MIT are pursuing roles in quant finance, the GPA expectation is really competitive. DE Shaw basically will not look at anyone from MIT that does not have a GPA above 4.8/5.0 (the same as a 3.8/4.0, MIT just uses a different scale) and almost exclusively takes people that have a perfect 5.0/5.0. This is because they have no reason to take anyone with a non-perfect GPA because there is such strong interest in working in quant finance. Beyond this, internship experience is huge (as always). A lot of the quant funds also like to see that you have explored trading/investing on your own. If this intrigues you, I'd be happy to send you some academic papers or books that I used to experiment with quant trading on my own. However, working at a less famous quant fund is much less competitive and pretty much anyone at MIT who majors in a technical subject with decent grades and some internships can get a quant finance job somewhere.
Hope this helps! Happy to answer more questions.