POV: competition math to Jane Street trader

Added: 2026-05-07

[00:00:00]Part one, the competition math kid. You are 13. The AMC 12 booklet is open on the dining room table next to a half-eaten bowl of your mother's rice.

[00:00:10]You scored 150 out of 150. The math team coach already knows. He calls your house twice that week. Your mom answers in her best English and writes the score on the fridge in green marker like it is a doctor's appointment. Your dad rearranges the basement. He buys the Art of Problem Solving books in a single Amazon order, all of them including the ones for kids twice your age. You don't have friends over anymore. When other parents ask what you are up to, your mom says, "Math." And they nod the way they nod when someone says cancer. Sophomore year, you make MOP. You spend 3 weeks on the Carnegie Mellon campus eating cafeteria pizza next to 28 other kids who all also demolished the AMC at 13.

[00:00:50]Everyone calls it MOP, even though for a long time it was officially MOSSP because nobody could agree on what the S stood for and one year the staff just deleted it. You hear that in the first hour. You laugh harder than you have in a year. First weekend, the older kids run the ELMO, a fake IMO they invent every year. The acronym changes annually because they think it is funny. You stay up until 2:00 solving a geometry problem that turns out to have been a joke the whole time. At 3:00 a.m., somebody proposes a bet on whether the cafeteria will be open at 6:00. You all enter the bet. You all wake up at 6:00 to see who was right. You are starting to understand something about how these people will live for the rest of their lives. Last day of MOP, you walk to a place called Waffleonia at midnight because someone said you have to. The waffles are fine. The walk back is the part that matters. Then on Sunday, you sign each other's gray t-shirts with Sharpie on the back, every one of you, 29 signatures crowded into a circle. You will keep this shirt for the next 15 years. You will see most of these names again on offer letters and wedding photos and on the IDs at the front desk of buildings in Lower Manhattan. You miss IMO selection by one problem. You should have gotten the geometry. You sit on the floor of your bedroom for an hour after the email and your parents do not come up. They do not know what to say to you about this and so they have decided to say nothing. The email sits open on your laptop. Downstairs, the TV is on too loud. Senior fall, the Princeton acceptance comes. The Princeton thing is supposed to be the trophy. It is for about 4 hours. Then, you open the next contest packet. The trophy is over. You learn this about yourself. Nothing stays a trophy. The thing you wanted yesterday is the price of admission to whatever you are supposed to want next. Part two, the internship. Princeton freshman fall, the Jane Street recruiter sits at a long table at Whitman and asks you, in the friendliest possible voice, how you would price a coin flip with a 1-second delay. You answer in 11 seconds. He smiles like he has just opened a present and did not have to buy it. Two of the kids he is recruiting at the next table are from your MOP year. You wave. 3 months later, all three of you will get the same intern offer. The intern offer arrives in February of sophomore year.

[00:03:00]25,000 a month for the summer, 10,000 signing on top and a return offer if the firm decides you fit. About half do.

[00:03:08]Your roommate's startup pitch deck is open on the other monitor claiming the company is worth $10 million. They have raised no money. They have no users. You close the deck. Your roommate is going to lose. You are not going to lose.

[00:03:21]Sophomore summer, you move into Sonder with most of the intern class, 2 Washington Street on Battery Park, directly across from the actual battery.

[00:03:29]Furnished studios, one bed each, a rooftop pool nobody uses because everyone is at the office until 10:00.

[00:03:36]Your first day in the intern bullpen at Brookfield Place, your seat is between two year three guys and across from an SP who started in May. They do not say a word to you for the first 2 weeks. They are watching. Every trade you simulate, every email you send, every off-the-cuff EV question they slide across the desk, it is a graded test. You figure this out on day three when one of them quietly hands you back a printout of your own scratch math, three lines circled in red. By the end of July, you have been to three Mets games, four Broadway shows, and a small private concert by Laufey in the firm's auditorium. She played Bewitched and Promise. The room of 50 interns and traders sang along on the second one without anyone asking them to. You walk back to Sonder afterward and do not say anything for six blocks. Three meals a day are free in the cafeteria. By August, your social circle is 28 people who all eat the same lobby salad. You will not have a friend outside this circle for the next 6 years. The official day ends at 5:30.

[00:04:34]Nobody leaves at 5:30. The last 2 weeks of August are final reviews and you are running practice books in the simulator until midnight every night. On the last Friday of August, they hand out offers in 15-minute meetings, one at a time.

[00:04:47]You are at 500 all in, 300 base, 200 guaranteed first year bonus, and they ask if you would like to come back next summer, too. About half of the trader cohort, roughly 30 of 60 interns, do not get offers at all. Three of the seven you have spent the summer with at Sonder are among the half. You take all eight of you out for steak that night. They split the bill anyway. Senior year, you barely go to class. The grades in October are a formality. Most nights, you do puzzle problems for fun, the Putnam in December and the IMC in March.

[00:05:19]With your MOP cohort scattered across the country in a group chat that has been called the same name for 7 years.

[00:05:25]Your roommate's startup gets into Y Combinator the week before graduation.

[00:05:29]You go to dinner. He pays. You go home and sign the W-4 paperwork on your laptop on the kitchen floor of the apartment you will leave in 9 days. Part three, the job. Year one, the first 6 months you rotate. 6 weeks on ETF ARB, 6 weeks on fixed income, 6 weeks on equity options, 6 weeks on FX. You bid for the seat you want at the end of it. They place you on index options in February.

[00:05:53]The seat is the seat you wanted. You wake up at 6:20, 11 blocks south, at the seat by 7:30. The seat means three monitors, a Bloomberg, and a chair you do not get up from except to use the bathroom. There is no dress code. Most days, you wear shorts and a hoodie. The code base is OCaml, which everyone outside the firm thinks is a joke.

[00:06:13]Around you are people who would be the smartest person at any other firm in the world. The year three sharp two desks over picks off your mispriced quote on a Tuesday morning before you have your coffee and at lunch he explains, with the patience of a tutor, what you missed. You write it down. 6 weeks later, you do the same thing to an SP who started in May. By February, your number for the year clears half a million and you read it twice. The structure is so flat there are no titles. Your boss's boss is just a guy named Mike who eats the same lobby salad as you. Year two, you date Anna for 9 months. She is a second-year associate at Cravath. You met her through a year five at the firm at a steakhouse on West Broadway and she is the only person in your life right now who is not from Jane Street. Your bonus this February lands at 850,000 for the year. The weekends are technically yours. Markets are closed. No one expects you in, but you fall asleep on her couch at 9:00 on a Saturday and wake up at 1:00. JS gives you 15 PTO days and you take three because markets are open on most of the days other people have off. The Iceland trip you had planned for her in November, you cancel because there is a vol event the next week and you do not want to be on a glacier when the book moves. You make it up by buying her a Cartier bracelet. She wears it once. She says, "You do not actually want to be here." You say, "I do." You both know it is not true. Year three, you buy your parents a house, the small one in town they used to drive past on weekends, 850,000 cash. You pay off the mortgage on the house you grew up in. You set up 529s for your sister's two kids who you have not met yet. You send your mom and dad on a Mediterranean cruise. Your dad sends a photo from the buffet. His smile is the one you have not seen since the AMC test on the fridge. Your mom sends a photo from the same dinner, just a plate of food, no caption. Then a text 2 hours later, "Did you eat?" You are at the desk. The market does not stop. Your math camp roommate from MOP is at Two Sigma now. Your high school crush is at Citadel Securities. Your USAMO coach is your boss's boss's boss, except there are no titles, so really he is just at the next desk over. You go to a wedding in Bryant Park where every man in the photo behind the bride works inside a four-block radius of where every other man in the photo works. The gray MOP t-shirt is folded in your closet at home. Three of the men in this photo signed it. 26, a Tuesday. You are at the desk at 7:15 p.m. doing the postmortem.

[00:08:40]The P&L was good. You have made 1.4 million in the calendar year and the year is not done. The thing they tell you when you sign on that you do not understand at 22 is that the firm eats your variance, both the upside and the downside. You are paid like the median person on your desk. You are not the median person on your desk. The realization is not anger. It is closer to noticing the weather. You leave the floor at 8:10. You walk. You do not go home. You walk south through Battery Park City along the Hudson, around the battery, and back up along the river piers, and you keep going. You do not call anyone. The people you would call are at their seats. The people you used to call before the seats are not the people you would call now. This is what 12 years of a perfect path actually buys you, a Tuesday at 8:10 where you do not know who to call. There is a woman in your firm who left 2 years ago. The non-compete is 12 months and the industry calls it garden leave. She told everyone she was actually going to take up gardening as a joke and then she did.

[00:09:38]You look her up on Facebook one Tuesday in November. She teaches Algebra II at a public high school in Vermont. The kids in the photo on her wall are 14 and laughing. She seems happy. Last week, the Bloomberg article came out. Jane Street snatched the Wall Street crown with a $39.6 billion trading hall, the largest annual revenue figure in the modern history of Wall Street. You worked on the desk that that ran a piece of it. The number does not feel real.

[00:10:03]You will go back tomorrow. You will be at the seat at 7:30. You will be good at this. You are extremely good at this.

[00:10:10]The arc you are inside of, you understand now, is not a story with an ending. The question you do not let yourself finish, the one underneath all of it, is whether you are doing anything with your one life that is meaningful at all.