How to: Break into Trading with a low GPA - not what you might think

I kind of just wanted to make this post and get the opinions of people in the industry now because I think this is actually a very feasible path for the next 1-2 years. The boring way is to just do an MFE or M.S. in a STEM subject then go for an internship again and redo your whole recruiting process, but I think until this skillset gets saturated with the same MIT/Harvard/Berkeley kids that you compete against in traditional trading roles then this might be an interesting way to go about it.

I've seen so many posts on /r/financialcareers and WSO about people who made a few mistakes and messed up with their GPA who say how hard they're willing to work to get into the industry. Before digital assets/crypto was a big area of focus for many firms, I'd say pretty much the only way to get into the field after messing up in undergrad was to get a master's degree. Now I think for the next 1-2 years there might be an opportunity to at least get the name of one of these firms I.e. Akuna, DRW, IMC, Jump, etc. on your resume and compete against an entirely different pool of applicants who come from all sorts of backgrounds.

I had a very non-traditional path to break into the industry and ended up with a < 3 GPA that got me automatically screened from many traditional firms for 2021 recruiting. 1 year later I had the same exact GPA and offers from 2 of the firms who screened me as well as a final round with Jump. (Although I had to get those interviews by networking, speaking with recruiters, and talking about my projects). 

It sounds like people are too picky with the product they want and just toss crypto aside but like... there are crypto futures, crypto options, crypto spot, etc. I am learning the same exact options theory as people who are on equity desks, the vol surface is just a little different, the way you think about markets and events might be a little different and there might be more focus on liquidity and cross-margining than in traditional markets, etc. 

My point is: You can still land at one of these firms if you just change the pool of candidates you're competing against. Learn about MEV (IMC has a 10+ person MEV Engineer team, Jump has a huge MEV team, maybe DRW and Akuna want to build into it, HRT probably does some), put out some research papers or thought pieces on the market landscape (fragmented liquidity, primitives like DeFi option vaults or Atlantic Options, etc.), and then learn some basic Data Analytics skills - build a dune dashboard. If you do these 3 you can easily land a role at a project company and translate that project company experience into a FT role with a trading firm (most of these trading firms are literally VC's who invest in these projects so their crypto team will definitely recognize these positions).

Is this a stupid path to go down? By learning about crypto and trading crypto at one of these firms - especially on the options side of things you're literally learning the same exact stuff (I literally speak with friends on the equity desk at a variety of places) and trading the same exact way with the same systems, worse case you end up with a translatable skillset to equities or FICC (crypto still reacts similarly to the news with risk assets other than maybe some correlational differences occasionally regulatory events) if crypto blows up. Best case you get the same exact name you wanted initially on your resume and paid the exact same and occasionally more since crypto vol is higher.

The downside here I guess is maybe you get put on a very niche team like a MEV team and you end up with solidity/smart-contract dev experience and not really trading experience but I can't think of much else yet other than it's a different market but options and futures are still options and futures.

You go from competing against students from MIT and Harvard CS/Math majors to competing against a significantly smaller pool of candidates where the main differentiator is the skill and experience you have in your niche. I know for a fact for some of the traditional firm roles that weren't advertising these positions I was competing against probably single-digit people and I just pointed to my previous research, MEV bots, and Uniswap V3 market-making bots and they practically gave me an offer then and there. I have no idea if I would've gotten an offer at Jump if I pitched myself differently, but I really wanted to be more trading/options focused instead of Dev and was very vocal about that.