D.E. Shaw Connect 2023

When I first got this email, I thought it was a scam:

It wasn’t until I read through the entire email that I realized this was the D.E. Shaw flying me out to NYC for free. And yes, in case you’re wondering, I entered college on August 23rd, 2023. Which means about one month into my freshman year of college, I was already travelling across the country for networking and career events. Crazy.

So obviously I accepted the trip, booked my hotel and flights, and passed through September until the day came. It felt like waiting for an early fall break, but if it only lasted two days. I hopped on my flight, got to my hotel in Midtown, dropped off my stuff, and then went to explore NYC. I visited some Midtown tourist attractions (Times Square was really close to my hotel) and then I promptly got lost in Central Park, which took a solid two hours to navigate out from. But by coincidence, I happened to wander to the venue for the Connect 2023 event.

My first impressions of the venue were quite amazing. As it stated further down in the email, they rented out the entire American Museum of Natural History, then topped it off with some fire poke bowls and steak, I mean the entire thing was very impressive (especially for just out of high school me). I mean based on conversations with some of the other invitees, D.E. Shaw likely dropped at least $1000 on each person there, and that’s not including the food and venue costs. If their goal was to impress, then I was blown away.

I met some very cool people at the event, usually from mutual connects (like I knew someone who knew them), talked with the recruiters a bit, and met some of my friends from high school and before at the event (like Ryan Liu). It turns out that I was one of a select few freshman invited to the event, which made me feel a bit special until I later realized that we were invited by mistake. Either way though, it was a great opportunity to meet peers from top schools across the country as well as connect with people I haven’t seen for a while. I went over to someone’s hotel room afterwards and just played some poker until ungodly hours into the night.

Partially due to my lack of sleep and the high energy throughout the previous day’s event, as well as my social battery being drained, I cancelled all my plans to sightsee NYC. Instead I decided on suprising my friend at Columbia (shoutout to Jason Qin) by just dropping into Columbia last minute. Then I sort of just tagged along with him and his roommate Luis for the day, just because why not. Columbia has a beautiful campus and it’s in the heart of NYC, but the food is god awful especially compared to off campus resteraunts and the venue food. I found out that day that I could enter Columbia’s library with my CMU ID, which was cool to know (there’s a list of peer schools and CMU was on the list apparently), especially when I had to take an exam for one of my classes on Zoom. Beautiful library by the way.

Overall I’d rate this trip 10/10. It was a short (two day) in and out NYC experience, but I probably absorbed a week’s worth of experiences in that time because when I got back to CMU, I just wanted to sleep for a whole day. I’d definitely go again if I had the chance to.