There are a lot of success stories online, and we're in the height of recruiting season, which means a lot of people are getting rejected from internships and full-time jobs right now. So I want to tell my own story, which is mostly a story about rejection, and explain why I think everything is going to be okay.
Every internship
It goes back to around sophomore year. I was a CS major taking a bunch of math finance classes, and I realized I really liked that area. I liked probability, poker, CS, ML, all of it—and that combination is more or less what quant is. So I pointed my whole resume at it. My final projects for both intro to ML and intermediate deep learning were about market forecasting, and I did a lot of quant competitions, all to get ready for the junior-year internship cycle.
Then I applied. Quant firms mostly, and big tech as well.
I got rejected from every single one. That was devastating, because everything you read online tells you the junior internship is the most important one of your life. If it goes well you get a return offer and you simply have a job. Even if it doesn't convert, you have something to talk about when you recruit for full time. I had neither, and it felt worse because I'd aimed at quant: all of my friends had internships to talk about while I was stuck with nothing.
The research I only did because I had nothing else
So that I'd have something to do with the summer, I applied to SURF, CMU's Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship.
The project started as a question about whether LLMs were capable and reliable enough to forecast market movements. They were still fairly new for this kind of thing. My plan was to feed a model a pile of different inputs—Beige Book text combined with correlations, returns, and variances—and see whether it could beat traditional algorithms. It turned out I struggled a lot and couldn't get consistent or good results at all.
So I turned the whole idea around and showed that LLMs have a lot of look-ahead bias, which is kind of funny given where I started. Everyone knows this now. At the time it was still a neat result to show people, an early look at why look-ahead bias matters so much more once LLMs are involved.
That's a bit of a tangent. The point is that instead of an internship, all I had was research—and I enjoyed it. Right after that summer I asked Vincent Conitzer whether I could do a senior honors thesis with him. I had two reasons. The first was that a thesis is how you get college honors—honestly, that one was for my ego. The second was to have more to talk about when I applied for jobs.
Every PhD program
I kept doing research and liked it more and more, and at some point I started thinking I should do a PhD. I figured CMU CS put me in a decent position to apply. The bigger reason was teaching. If you've read my other posts you know how much I love it, and the general understanding is that you need a PhD to teach at a university. Teaching is my main passion and the thing I want to be doing long term, so the plan became simple—grind research, get into a PhD program, keep teaching.
PhD applications are due senior fall. All I had to submit was the SURF project and half of an undergrad thesis. I thought that was enough. I'd read things online saying you don't need much experience as long as you show passion, and somewhere in my head that had convinced me. If you look at admissions results now, you need real publications to get into a CS PhD program, and I learned that the hard way.
The one interview was actually pretty nice. I still got rejected by every program. My only acceptance was staying at CMU for the master's, which is research-focused, and that turned out to be a good thing—I could keep working with Vince for another year and get better at research. So I stayed, with the plan of spending that year both applying to PhDs again and looking for jobs.
Citadel
The master's is one year, so I was applying again that fall. Citadel gave me an interview, and then a lot more of them, for quant researcher. That was one of the top roles I'd been aiming for, since it combines my interest in markets and math with getting to research and develop new ideas. It was close to a dream job. I passed most of the rounds and made it to the final one. They flew me to New York, put me in a very nice hotel, and ran a superday.
Somewhere in the back of my mind I thought I might actually have a shot. I could finally get rich, have a job I'd probably enjoy, and stop recruiting.
I got rejected from the superday—I still don't know why. It was a real hit, because it meant I was back to square one with no job, thinking about PhD applications all over again.
Voleon
Then came an interview from The Voleon Group, a hedge fund in Berkeley. I kept passing rounds, and what made their process different from everyone else's was how much we talked about my research. The interviewers were far more interested in it than people at other firms had been. A few of those interviews turned into long, good discussions about my past projects and the master's thesis I was in the middle of.
I kept going and ended up in the final round, which I hadn't expected. And at the end of December, close to Christmas, I got the message: congratulations, an offer from The Voleon Group as a software engineer.
That was my first job offer, ever. Every internship had said no and every PhD program had said no, and this was the first yes.
How the rejections connect
When I look at what got me here, it's the failures stacked on top of each other. I think the reason Voleon was interested in me, and Citadel too, was my research. And I only got into research because every internship turned me down.
Did SURF research instead, and found out I liked it
Stayed at CMU for a research master's and got much better at research
Kept interviewing, and Voleon wanted to talk about the research
Ended up TAing whatever I wanted (story below)
It felt like everything was getting turned down. Each time it led me to a different path, and in the end the detour still worked out.
The same thing happened with teaching
A smaller version of this story, since it follows the same pattern.
Starting freshman spring I wanted to TA, because I really wanted to teach. I applied to a bunch of CS courses and never got into any of them. Fun fact: I applied to TA 15-150 three times in a row and was rejected every time, and nobody ever told me why.
The first recitation of my own came sophomore spring, for differential equations, at 8 AM. I asked whether I could switch to a different time—Clive Newstead said no. It would be a good learning experience, he told me, and I'd be fine.
So that was a lot of rejection followed by something I didn't really want. But look at how senior year went. I TA'd two courses at once and picked whichever recitation time suited me. I got to the point where if I wanted to TA a course, I could ask the professor and they'd let me, because people knew my work. Professors trusted me enough to let me experiment and write new course content just to see what would happen.
Where I am now
Here is the current status. I was rejected from every internship my junior year and from every PhD program I applied to in undergrad, and I didn't make it through Citadel.
I'm a software engineer at a hedge fund in the Bay Area. The weather is great and I get to do a lot of outdoor activities, which I love. The culture is laid back in the way big tech is, and I spend my days around researchers in a research environment, which is something I really enjoy. I have five papers that are either out or on their way out. I have a YouTube channel I love working on and Quant Engine, the platform I built so anyone can learn quant finance concepts for free, and I'm pretty happy with where I am.
What now
The question I get, and the one I keep asking myself, is where I go from here. I honestly don't know. I just started at my company and have no intention of leaving. If I ever want to go back into academia, I have publications to show and a much stronger background than I did the first time. If I want to go somewhere else, a CMU bachelor's and master's in CS plus the work experience should let me do that too. And if I decide I just want to be a freediving instructor in Puerto Rico, I'm currently one level away.
Even when the rejections pile up, they find a way to help you later, and they build the foundation for a stronger version of you.
Failure is not the end. Each of those rejections sent me somewhere I wouldn't have chosen, and each of those places made me better at something I ended up needing.