The 25 universities Jane Street loves most for its quants & engineers
What does it take to join Jane Street, the electronic trading and market making firm that paid its staff over $2m per head last year? For its coveted trading and engineering roles, it overwhelmingly hires at graduate level; for its latest intern program, it hired from over 103 different colleges, but that doesn't stop it from having some favourites.
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According to LinkedIn profiles for current Jane Street staff, the most frequently recurring university among employees is MIT, by a significant margin; more than 100 of its current employees studied there. Its second and third favourite universities are in England: Cambridge and Oxford have at least 89 and 88 alumni working at the firm, respectively.
Below is a table containing the 13 most popular North American universities for Jane Street employees, the seven most popular in Europe, and the five most popular in APAC.
Not only is MIT the most popular for Jane Street employees in general, it's also the most popular for its coveted trading roles. It's not so closely followed by Harvard and Oxford. For its engineers, the top universities are a little more intriguing. Carnegie Mellon is the current top university for engineers, but Cambridge and the University of Waterloo are also very popular for these roles.
If you're more interested in an internship than a full-time role, examining ex-employees (the majority of which only interned there) can be more useful. MIT, of course, tops the list, but Harvard seems to produce more interns than any of the remaining schools. Waterloo again punches above its weight here; this is helped by the fact that it has a co-op program in which students are mandated to complete six internships.
Not included in the list are Indian IITs, which are known to be a huge source of talent for electronic trading firms in APAC. It seems most IIT graduates joining Jane Street tend to keep their profiles under wraps, but the firm has reportedly hired students from these schools on packages of up to $500k in their first year alone. For other schools in APAC, Hong Kong universities seem to be the most popular, but the National University of Singapore is a good alternative.
Jane Street has said in the past that it's not too hung up on its applicants studying a specific degree, but it's a safe bet that you'll need excellent STEM fundamentals. When we analyzed its 2025 internship cohort, a third studied mathematics in some capacity and two thirds studied computer science (many studied both). This is likely because Jane Street staff say the modules and projects you choose are the most important part of your degree, and those subjects tend to have the most intellectually stimulating options. At MIT, for example, working in the AI lab CSAIL will help you to stand out.
Your specific school may not matter that much since Jane Street puts out feelers for top candidates well before then. Hilal Hussein, an MIT student who interned at Jane Street, said in a YouTube video last year that Jane Street and other quant firms were attending his high school mathematics tournaments.
Jane Street declined to comment.
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