I would venture to say the average Jane street worker has done more good for society than the average cancer researcher or Alzheimer’s researcher.
For fusion research, the quantitative skills from many Jane Street people can easily transfer to make meaningful contributions to fusion research.
Or you can take your ~10M or whatever in earnings during a decade as an OCaml programmer at Jane Street and fund a cutting-edge cancer research lab?
Are you reading yourself after you type?
Might be one of the more arrogant things I've read. And I frequent WallStreetOasis.
Also I said the average researcher, meaning taken from the global population, ie not from a top institute. Jane Street is highly concentrated in talent that produce real results in the world.
The average cancer researcher has probably done more good than the average trading firm worker though.
This is just blatant Jane Street (and more generally, hedge fund) propaganda.
Yes, you serve some role within the financial system, but you're not really relevant to society imminently and to non-western societies generally.
Who do you think is supervising the high school student? Where does the idea for the project come from? Where does the money supporting the high school intern' experiments come from?
Spend your money attending conferences to make connections and get yourself updated in the field.
Hire technicians to help with your grunt work. Spend your days reading research papers, discussing science at conferences, and setting up new experiments.
More often, you are trying something that hasn't been done before and you're getting results that don't quite make sense. Here, experience and background knowledge seem key, and I'm not sure that you'll pick up much of that in a year, even in a "top lab" because experiments are slow. On top of that, you'll need to learn how to design experiments and analyze/present their results in ways that your peers find convincing, which is in itself a non-trivial skill. All this presumes that you're even able to find your way into a "top lab", but that's not a foregone conclusion either: these places can be incredibly selective even among people with a decade of experience in the same field.
Put another way, your answer assumes there's a lot of fat to trim in the PhD/postdoc stages. What is it and can it really be cut down by 90% as you propose?
