Interns make money on Wall Street. In any case, they earn a hefty salary at a well-known trading firm, Jane Street Capital. The company just listed the annual base salary for some of its internships as high as $250,000.
The generous payday is there for the taking for recent graduates or current students looking to test the waters in qualitative research, trading, software, Windows engineering and more. And no prior industry experience is required.
“If you’ve never considered a career in finance, you’re in good company,” the job description reads.
Jane Street can afford to pay its interns the highest amount; after all, it blooms. The company is on track to end the year with record sales Bloomberg.
As the company grows, they appear to be looking to expand with 57 open positions in New York alone Financial timeswho first reported the news wrote.
That said, these internships are not year-round. A lucky intern who works from May to August will take home almost $21,000 before taxes every month.
That’s about four times what the average American earned monthly in the last quarter of 2023 — $4,949, according to USA Today.
Jane Street isn’t the only company offering interns six-figure salaries
Internships have gained a reputation for often being unpaid work. But the rapid response to how this system favors privileged individuals who can afford to take these positions has slowly changed the landscape.
And companies are starting to pay substantially to land top talent: Average salaries for Glassdoor’s list of the Best Internships of 2024 range from $7,000 to $10,333. The ranking is dominated by technology companies, with 18 out of 25, but financial and consultancy firms also remain competitive
Intern raises not only help Gen Z, it’s also a way to build a better pipeline for attracting and retaining young workers.
Fueled by a tight economy, marred by inflation and often faced with student loan debt, Generation Z is pushing for a good-paying job. However, that’s not all they want. Many (62%) Generation Zers would accept a lower salary for a better work-life balance, according to a Top Employers Institute survey of 1,700 respondents aged 18 to 27.
In the case of Jane Street, the company is looking for “smart, ambitious people who enjoy solving challenging problems” and are “more interested in how you think and learn than in what you currently know than in your background,” said one of their mentions.
But securing an internship has never been more difficult
Even though the landscape of internships has changed, young adults face an uphill battle finding a job. More than half (57%) of the class of 2025 say they are pessimistic about starting their career, according to a survey of 1,925 members of the cohort of job platform Handshake. That is an increase compared to 49% last year.
Indeed, reports have emerged recently of a drawn out and frustratingly callous and convoluted application process. The rise of AI use in the hiring process and layoffs are factors in this bleak landscape, wrote Hillary Hoffower. Fast company. Even entry-level roles are often listed as requiring prior experience. It’s a trend that signals a desire not to nurture talent, but simply to poach it, Wharton’s Peter Cappelli said on the Harvard Business School podcast.
“We don’t help people become skilled at their work, and we certainly don’t help them develop either. We are completely focused on acquiring talent,” he said.
Some aspiring interns are forced to use new entrepreneurial methods to land their entry-level jobs.
Basant Shenouda told it Fortune that she used LinkedIn to get her job, just not in the conventional sense of the website. To see which conference recruiters were posting, Shenouda handed out her resume during the break. It got her a job on LinkedIn itself.
“The market is so saturated with such incredible talent that it takes some creativity to stand out from the crowd,” says Ayala Ossowski, a Gen Zer who pitched herself to pizza companies while wearing her college merchandise during her day job. It gave her her first internship after a month, she said.
“Success in this market requires a strategic and intentional approach, and seniors are already taking proactive steps to stand out,” said Christine Cruzvergara, Chief Education Strategy Officer at Handshake. Fortune in August, noting that “the number of applications per job has been significantly higher than in the past five years.
Are you an intern at Jane Street or another Wall Street employer who wants to share your story? Contact chloe.berger@fortune.com.
This story originally appeared on Fortune.com
