The best university for developer jobs at Citadel Securities, Jane Street is in Canada.
Intern recruitment at electronic trading firms is extensive, but also very selective. You'll probably need to be attending a top school to stand a chance. For engineering and quant development roles, one university stands out with some unusual quirks.
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The University of Waterloo, based in the Canadian city of the same name, is one of the top fonts of talent for trading firms. Both Citadel Securities and Jane Street employ more Waterloo alums in engineering roles than any other school, based on our previous estimations. This is despite it being the 115th ranked university globally according to QS and regularly ranking between 20th and 30th for computer science specifically.
Waterloo's edge isn't necessarily its teaching, but a co-op program that requires students to participate in six internships before they graduate. In addition to trading firms and hedge funds, the program also provides internships from Big Tech and fintechs like Stripe. Co-op programs are five years to allow for extra time to complete all six. These internships aren't always at major or prestigious firms, but because you do so many, you can grow your experience at smaller firms and still apply for big names further into your course.
Students have good things to say about the teaching, too. One we spoke to, who interned at various top quant firms, praised its "really practical courses like Object-Oriented Programming where you learn C++ quite deeply." In other computer science degrees, you're more likely to be coding in Python or Java. The school's advanced math classes like combinatorics are also thought to be especially good.
The program also has a 'Big Three' of advanced computer science courses: 'Computer Graphics', 'Compilers' and 'Real-Time Operating Systems. Rudi Chen, a Waterloo graduate who interned at Jane Street while studying there, said on Quora that these courses have a "particular reputation" and require "a significant amount of programming maturity." Chen graduated back in 2017, but the student we spoke to affirms that the big three is still highly regarded.
Doing the course is no guarantee of a top quant internship, as the school accepts a large volume of students; Waterloo says over 26k students have participated in the co-op program. Despite having the moniker of 'The MIT of the North', Waterloo alums on jobs forum Blind say "the average student cannot compete with the average at MIT," and that their positive perception is because "you only hear about the good ones." Citadel Securities says its 'school agnostic' when recruiting, so just being on the program isn't enough; you have to be the best.
Waterloo alumni in finance range from the senior to the bizarre. Ex-Morgan Stanley algorithmic trading head Heath Windcliffe, now at Quadrature, was a Waterloo PhD mathematician. Felix/Ophelia Bauckholt, the Tower Research Capital quant who died in a shootout on the Canadian border last month, was also a Waterloo alum.
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