Get to Know Us
Hear from Jane Streeters who work in a variety of roles.
The people featured in these videos jumped at the chance to answer
some of the questions we would expect to be asked in person and to
tell you firsthand what makes Jane Street a rewarding place to work.
It’s hard to capture everything that we’d like to share with you in a
series of short videos but we hope these give you a sense of what it’s
like to work at Jane Street and the types of people you’d be working
alongside.
Transcript
Get to Know Us | Jane Street
Hi, I’m Nancy. I am a trader in the London office and I started in
2017.
What did you study in school and how did it help you prepare for a job at Jane Street?
In uni I studied math and I’d say that it’s the problem solving
aspects of this degree that is more directly useful to my job today,
rather than anything specifically theoretical.
What classes do you recommend I take?
I think that it’s more important to prioritize things that you find
interesting enough to be curious and ask questions and think about,
but for anything specific, I would recommend probability and
programming. Probability because I find that on the trading floor, we
tend to use the language of basic probability quite a lot in
communicating how we think about things. And programming is because
it’s a skill that is useful on the job and is something that I didn’t
quite have much background in and wished that I had at the start of
the job.
What is a trading internship project like?
An example of a project that you might work on is that it’s usually
going to be investigating some effect in the marketplace that your
mentor has hypothesized from the trading that they watch. Usually
they’ll like set out the question to you and suggest a framework for
how to approach this, but it will be up to you to decide how you’re
going to use statistical tools and how you’re going to interpret the
results that you get from your data.
How long did it take before you felt like you had real responsibilities as a full timer?
It’s pretty easy to pinpoint the moment that I sent my first order
into the marketplace as a moment of real responsibility. This happened
about four months after I joined. I think four months in is about when
I felt more like the primary person responsible for watching a
relatively small strategy.
How is working at Jane Street different than you expected?
Something that I did find unexpected was I was taught that even a low
confidence opinion could be a valuable input into how a desk thinks
about things, which I thought was pretty cool.
One of the things I love the most about Jane Street is how global the
entire company feels. It’s really cool to have lots of opportunities
to talk and work really closely on problems with, um, my colleagues in
Hong Kong and New York. I like how having an office in each of the
different time zones means that we can collaborate really seamlessly.
