Christina Popa: It felt daunting to make a decision to pick a career outside of academia when I hadn’t really experienced anything else.
Ken Baron: I’d really encourage people to consider doing a summer internship. It’s an opportunity for you to come to a place like New York City and get exposure to an area that you might be interested in.
Emily Tallman: What I really liked about Two Sigma was both the company culture and the format of the internship program.
Haixiang Zhang: Two Sigma has a company culture that is very similar to technology companies.
Emily Tallman: The internship program has you working on a real project. I really enjoy the fact that I get to have impact while I’m here.
Madalina Persu: You experience firsthand what a day-to-day job entails. It’s very nice to be able to focus on cutting edge research without having to worry about a bottleneck of compute resources.
Haixiang Zhang: My mentor and the other group members in the group I’m interning with are also very nice and I have already learned a lot from them.
Ken Baron: Having folks come to Two Sigma and see what we’re up to, and talk to other people who have PhDs and have been a few years ahead of them, is a great way for them to get exposure to Two Sigma and see possible career opportunities.
Emily Tallman: There’s a lot of things happening in academia that I think would be relevant in industry. I really like how Two Sigma has helped bridging that gap. I enjoyed getting to meet different PhD students from different schools. Getting to hear about all of their research was very interesting and might be relevant to my own research as well as my project here at Two Sigma.
Ken Baron: As a firm, we really instill a culture of learning and curiosity, and giving employees exposure to cutting edge things that are going on in academia across a variety of disciplines.
Christina Popa: I remember my last day, I felt somewhat panicked because I had all of these ideas that I really wanted to work on, but my internship was over and I had to wait a full year to come back.