How important are spring weeks and insight events when applying for electronic trading internships?

Your best shot at a graduate job in an electronic trading firm is to get an internship and convert it. Those internships are themselves incredibly difficult to obtain, with acceptance rates as low as 0.1% for top firms. There are plenty of other events run by these firms, including spring-weeks and insight events, but do they really improve your chances of getting an internship? Students we've spoken to believe so. 

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Most pre-internship programs seem to accept ~1% of applicants, including Citadel/Citadel Securities' discover event in London, which was expanded from one day to four in this year's iteration. IMC Trading's launchpad internship in Amsterdam had a similar acceptance rate. Some events have acceptance rates slightly below that figure, including Optiver's career kickstarter in Amsterdam; one r/quantfinance user said that this is a 1-week training program in which top performers can receive full-time return offers.  Jane Street's academy of math and programming (AMP) in New York, targeted at incoming first year students, has an acceptance rate of ~8%. These are all a lot easier to obtain than a summer internship, but by no means easy to get, which immediately helps you stand out.

The content of these events is also useful. One attendee of multiple events said that they were "clueless for the most part" about quant finance at first, but the events helped him "learn more about the industry and what specifically I wanted to do." Some programs are more advanced and give students a chance to participate in trading simulations, but even these events are "given a more mathematical twist instead of being too finance focused" to make it accessible to new entrants. Multiple students said that attendance of spring weeks directly came up in some (not all) internship applications. One student told us that, while you need to be "academically good" to get into these events, "they care a lot more about your story than your ability." He said that firms are "really pushing towards giving more access and opportunity" for less privileged candidates.

The application process for these events varies from firm-to-firm. Citadel's London insight event only assessed students on their CVs, but other events like Optiver's kickstarter, are thought to include interviews and online assessments in their application process. 

Some events run by trading firms are free to enter and have a lot of upside. IMC runs Prosperity, a yearly themed trading competition; this year, students were tasked with building algorithms to trade resources on an alien planet and build out their own colony. We've noted that top performers in these events are often brought in by IMC or other trading firms for internships, but one participant said that it helped them get a full time job at a trading firm despite having no summer internships. Various firms run datathons which you can also use to demonstrate your technical prowess. 

There's also financial incentives for multiple programs. Prosperity's winners share a $50k prize pool while Jane Street's AMP attendees are given a $5k scholarship for "future educational opportunities." Hudson River Trading's WITTI (women in trading technology internship) has been known to pay up to $19k over four weeks.

The trading firms above each either declined to comment or did not respond to a request for comment regarding the acceptance rates for their programmes.

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