Some notes on things I’ve applied to, and what it seemed like they were selecting for. (If I remember and it seems potentially-useful to people, I’ll update this in future.)
2025 summer internships
Bridgewater (Investment Associate)
- Got a cold email from a recruiter with an interesting subject line (“Do you have an obsessive curiosity to understand the world? Get to know Bridgewater.”)
- Submitted a 5min initial application form, uploading my CV and filling out degree details
- Went to first round of interviews, a 1hr group discussion about a PPE-ish question
touching on a public policy question, moderated by two of their staff
- Obviously they were interested in how you deal with suggestions from others & interact in a meeting-like setting
- It’s a weird environment – you might try to undermine the others in your group (since they are the « competition ») but without being too transparent about it
- Invited back for the next round the following day, with just me and two interviewers
- I was impressed by their speed!
- There was another PPE-ish idea to discuss (this time political philosophy), and then a series of enjoyably meandering questions about an interest of mine (I chose Oxheart, matchmaking, and dating apps)
- About a week later there was a similar format of me and two interviewers, except online
- There was one game theory question that also tried to elicit my preferences regarding risk & income,
and then maybe another that I’ve forgotten
- Again, it felt like just a fun discussion
- There was one game theory question that also tried to elicit my preferences regarding risk & income,
and then maybe another that I’ve forgotten
- The final round was a 1:1 online interview with a more senior person
- This was by far the least interesting interview and felt pretty unnecessary to me
- It was the first time I was asked “Why Bridgewater?” (I fumbled a bit, before – truthfully! – saying that I had liked by what I’d seen of their culture so far and was attracted to a place that moves quickly in a no-nonsense way. After prompting, I hastened to add that I was also interested in finance and the actual work they do…)
- After that, it just reprised some of the themes I’d discussed in my earlier interview about dating
- Overall, they seemed to care a lot about analytic thinking skills, but not much else
- To break it down into three specific competencies: (a) forming sensible views about new topics & communicating those clearly, (b) adjusting your position in response to criticism, while also pushing back where you have conviction, (c) coming up with quasi-mathematical / empirical frameworks you could use to answer abstract questions
- I think it’s also important to be comfortable relating the questions they ask you to core economic concepts (like adverse selection, incentives, risk), although I only did so in a fairly loose, qualitative way
Jane Street (Strategy & Product)
- Uploaded my CV to their website, skipping out the optional “Why do you want to work at Jane Street” question
since there wasn’t anything special I wanted them to know
- The honest answer is that I have quite a few reasons:
- Even though going into finance/trading isn’t my most probable career path, doing an internship keeps that option open, is a helpful signal of my general competence for a CV, and is a nice opportunity to earn a bunch of money which I might donate
- I expect I’d enjoy being there – various friends & acquaintances (especially from the EA and rationality communities) are / used to be at Jane Street and generally have very positive things to say about their colleagues and the intellectual appeal of their work. So if I did go into the industry, Jane Street would be one of my top choices
- It would be interesting to properly understand quant trading; based on what I’ve heard about the effort they put into designing a good internship curriculum, Jane Street is probably the best place to do this
- I want to learn about how organisations work, and what contributes to their success. I could read all that’s been written about Jane Street’s distinctive culture, but that’s no substitute for actually being there and carefully observing for myself how things happen, what the internal power dynamics & politics are like, etc.
- The honest answer is that I have quite a few reasons:
- Took the online assessment which had some basic probability questions, a comprehension test about order books,
and some trading-related reasoning puzzles
- The probability and order book content was a bit easy, but I think the point was just to check you had an OK level of mathematical ability before they spent interviewer time on you.
- It was miles better than the Civil Service Fast Stream internship assessments I tried out
- The maths (arithmetic) section was hugely repetitive and absurdly Claude-able, mostly involving calculating percentage changes.
- I never like situational judgement tests, because the action I would actually take is often some combination of the options they present, and in any case extremely dependent on context, so it feels like a silly game of guessing what the examiner want you to select.
- Had a 40min online interview going through an extended scenario of how you might set up a new system
for a company and investigate how its implementation was going
- A little bit of economic intuition about profits & costs was helpful, but it wasn’t anything mathematical
- Went to onsite day with three rounds of interviews, including a case study to read about in advance
- I was asked a few (very basic) technical questions about finance in one interview, which I was
rather poorly prepared for and slightly put out by, since the topics weren’t covered in the case study and
all of Jane Street’s advertising says there’s no need to know anything sector-specific.
- I do wonder whether the goal here was to see how well I dealt with being confused / mistaken, as well as the more basic job of checking whether I engaged with & understood the pre-reading.
- The other two interviews were about high-level computer system design in a trading context, and my understanding of order book basics.
- I was asked a few (very basic) technical questions about finance in one interview, which I was
rather poorly prepared for and slightly put out by, since the topics weren’t covered in the case study and
all of Jane Street’s advertising says there’s no need to know anything sector-specific.
- Like Bridgewater, they seemed to care about your ability to come up with frameworks to answer with. There was much more emphasis on computational thinking and concrete questions in a financial setting, though.
- I felt like Jane Street’s process was somewhat less well-run than Bridgewater’s, though I still left with a good impression of them
(maybe slightly more positive than I had started with, which is presumably their aim)
- Their online assessment felt very janky and low-effort
- e.g. you had to copy out long numbers into answer boxes in a repetitive way, they had stuck badly-sized screenshots of Google Sheets tables into the questions, the UI meant you had to keep scrolling up and down the page
- Their scheduling software for the video interview was also overly complicated and slow to use
- The final round took up a whole day even though I was only in interviews for a total of perhaps 2.5hrs
- I had to do a lot of itty-bitty waiting around in the office, during which time it was difficult to be productive on anything
- On the other hand, being there in person did mean I got to know the firm better, and felt more attached to it (again, exactly what they want)
- Their online assessment felt very janky and low-effort