Chiamaka Igwe

I see a lot of curiosity about this, so I’m going to provide some insight as someone that has similar experience. Short answer is no. Neither company has a special exchange program with UNILAG. Goldman Sachs in particular had (maybe still has) a dedicated African Recruiting Initiative (ARI). I know this because I was part of the first set of interns recruited under ARI in 2018 while I was an undergrad at LAUTECH. I later returned as a full-time engineer and interviewed students for the same program. Goldman started ARI in 2018 as an effort to improve diversity at the company. Software engineers flew in from London, New York, and Hong Kong to Lagos to hold a recruitment day where they shared insights about the company and interviewed candidates through group projects and 1:1 interviews, followed by HackerRank assessments and final remote 1:1 interviews. I found out about the opportunity through Stutern and Jobberman at the time. The inaugural program recruited both full-time engineers and summer interns. Successful interns were hired into the London office, and Goldman partnered with SEO (hence the SEO connection) to prepare candidates for corporate life before they moved to London. Candidates who did well during the internship got return offers as full-time engineers, so many of us already had full-time offers before graduating. The first cohort was quite diverse, with students from UNILAG, Covenant, LAUTECH, UI, OAU, and Ashesi (Ghana). It was mostly dominated by students from UNILAG and Covenant, largely because of access to information. They found out about the program, shared it among themselves, and prepared together, and it’s the same reason they continue to dominate YoY. The program has continued since 2018, with subsequent years mostly hiring summer interns, so it’s mainly open to students still in school. There have also been a lot of changes to the process over the years. Applications for the next summer usually open around November/December, so if you’re a student looking to work at these firms, keep an eye on LinkedIn or regularly check their careers page. Personally, the program was life-changing, and I tried to pay it forward by mentoring a few friends who also got into the program and were retained as full-time engineers. Many of us from that first cohort have since grown into VPs at Goldman or moved on to become senior engineers at Meta, Google, Microsoft, Palantir, DRW, and Citadel etc while others have gone on to start companies. So if you’re a student looking to work at these companies, the easiest way in is through the internship pipeline, so hustle for it while you’re still in school. That said, I’ve also seen people who didn’t get in through the internship route come in later as full-time engineers, so that’s very possible too. Hope this helps someone.