Summer Internship in Computational Finance Kane Capital Management (KCM) has up to 8 openings for students interested in a summer internship (http://www.kanecap.com/internship/index.html) in quantitative finance. KCM (www.kanecap.com) is a market-neutral quantitative equity hedge fund located in Harvard Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The internships will run for 12 weeks. We are flexible about starting/ending dates, but prefer that interns begin no later than May 26th. Pay is $800 per week. The ideal applicant will have significant computer programming experience. Do you learn new programming languages for fun? Is Perl your friend? If so, then we would like to hear from you. A background in statistics is useful. A few economics classes never hurt anyone. But the key requirement is the ability to make the computer do what you want it to do. We are especially interested in hearing from freshmen. We hope that the internship will lead to part time work during the school year and more work in future summers. But that depends on how much we like you and how much you like us. Applications from sophomores and juniors are also welcome. The work is almost all programming related. In simple terms, we want to determine what the price of a share of IBM will be three months from now. Doing this is mostly a matter of statistics. Doing good statistics requires accurate data. Gathering, combining, cleaning and sorting data is much harder than you might think. We need your help. We use Perl for data processing and PostgreSQL for data storage. You would spend most of you time working in R (www.r-project.org). You can get a sense for the job by checking out the open source packages for R that we and previous interns have created. http://kanecap.com/publications.html You may spend part of the summer working on these packages. This is a good internship for a computer-savvy student interested in finance, as opposed to a finance-savvy student interested in computers. We expect you to know programming. We will teach you finance. There may also be some library research involved as well as various goofy side projects. For example, our interns have spent time on things like: http://wso.williams.edu/wiki/index.php/Elimination_of_fraternities http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubin_Causal_Model http://lancetiraq.blogspot.com/ If you are looking for a fancy Wall Street firm where everyone dresses well and talks smoothly, KCM is not the place for you. Our office is dingy. In the summer, we dress in shorts and sandals. Tie-dye is our official firm color. To apply, send an e-mail to david .at. kanecap.com. We do not need a fancy cover letter or beautifully formatted resume. We need you to describe, in detail, your programming experience and style. What is your favorite editor? Have you used source control? What do you think of test cases? Which operating system do you prefer? What computer science classes have you taken? What programming jobs have you done? If these questions make no sense to you, then you are probably not the person that we are looking for. A further requirement will involve using R and our other tools for one of your classes this spring. We realize that this is a pain, but one of the reasons that we are able to offer such an unusual internship to younger students is that we ensure that they are ready to go to work from Day 1. Harvard students will be required to take GOV 2001. http://gking.harvard.edu/g2001syl/syl.html Williams and other non-Harvard students will either a) Take GOV 2001 via the Harvard Extension school (we will pay the fees for this) or b) Take a local course that offers similarly rigorous training, either on its own or in conjunction with independent study on your part. STAT 442 is a reasonable choice for Williams students. In your application e-mail, you should explain what class you intend to take. We expect you to use the same tools that we use for whatever class you take this spring. Those tools are R, XEmacs, ESS (Emacs Speaks Statistics), LaTeX, Subversion and a UNIX-like operating system (Linux or Mac). See this pdf (http://www.kanecap.com/internship/kcm_intro.pdf) for details. We also expect you to do a finance related project for your class (even if your class does not require such a project). Feel free to ask us (and your fellow interns) questions about any of these requirements. We realize that this is a bother, but it is the only reasonable way to ensure that you are ready to hit the ground typing come June.