The nightmare of graduate tech and quant applications: "It's luck of the draw"
It can be daunting to apply for an internship or graduate opportunity as a STEM graduate. The top programs boast acceptance rates of less than 1% and recruiters told us last year that even verified, high-quality candidates are struggling. Today, the situation seems even more dire.
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"I've applied to over 500 roles, I think... I stopped keeping count after 350," an engineering student at a top US school told us. "I cold messaged literally hundreds of people and only two responded." He has since received an offer from a top AI lab; "if I didn't have that, I'd be low-key cooked."
One recent PhD hedge fund intern told us "acceptance rates are extraordinarily low." He said the miniscule figures touted by these firms may be an understatement, since roles sometimes remain open for weeks after the recruiters are done with them.
What does it take, then, to get in? Although many firms say they're school-agnostic, there tends to be overwhelming bias towards top institutions. "It's a better signal for a stronger student if they have this background," the engineering student told us, although the content of the courses themselves isn't that impressive. "You can learn everything useful on my course within six months." The advanced subjects on these courses are a pre-requisite when applying to top firms; more must be done to stand out. The hedge fund intern said that "a lot of kids getting into these top schools can't actually do anything," and that standards have dropped for the best schools since COVID.
Recruiters often point to personal projects as a way of doing that. The engineering student said he spent roughly 150 hours building projects from scratch for the people that he cold messaged, even with the assistance of AI. The hedge fund intern said that many projects from undergraduates on his internship class were "awful" and that they got in essentially through "luck of the draw."
The hedge fund intern said that being a published author in your field matters now more than ever. "Anyone can vibe code a project," he said. "Getting into a top research group and getting your work past reviewers is a filter of a filter." The top undergraduates he encountered at his hedge fund already had either a published paper, or a prior internship in finance.
This also means that the school you attend becomes more important than ever; a lot of the top labs, like CSAIL at MIT, are concentrated among the top schools. The engineering student said that "for AI roles, you need to have some kind of boundary-pushing development in your field." No pressure.
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