2029 Fintech Academy - Greenwood Project Scholar Program

About The Greenwood Project

At Greenwood Project, we open doors in financial services for undergraduate freshmen. We give our scholars three things: social capital, the network that comes from knowing people inside the industry. Academic and technical capital, the training the work actually requires. And aspirational capital, the belief that the seat belongs to you.

Scholars commit to twelve months of training, deliver real work on real deadlines, and finish knowing whether this industry is for them. Many go on to internships and full time offers.

The Fintech Academy

This academy trains the analytical and operational foundation underneath financial services.

Where this training leads

These are the roles this academy prepares you for. Each one maps directly to what you will study.

• Fintech product and operations analysis. Working alongside product and operations teams to find what is broken, decide what matters most, and make the case for fixing it. This is the role our capstone puts you in.
• Trading operations. Everything that has to happen after a trade is agreed. Confirming it, clearing and settling it, making sure the right money and securities land in the right accounts, and finding the break when they do not. It is one of the largest entry points into a firm.
• Operations more broadly. The rest of the machinery: onboarding clients, moving payments, reconciling accounts, handling corporate actions. When operations fails, it is expensive and public.
• Risk, compliance, and fraud. Figuring out what could go wrong, how likely it is, and how much it would cost. This includes fraud detection and the checks that confirm who a firm is doing business with.

Program Overview

We are recruiting 100 scholars into the Fintech Academy for the 2029 cohort. Across all three Greenwood academies we will select 325.

You are eligible if you are currently a freshman graduating in 2030. We call this the 2029 cohort because Summer 2029 is the internship you are working toward.

When What happens

• October 2026 to June 2027: Rolling admissions. Decisions every month. November is the priority round.
• July 2027: Academy begins.
• July 2027 to June 2028: Twelve months of training, from the summer after freshman year through your sophomore year.
• Fall 2028: Junior year internship recruiting season. Greenwood supports you through interviews.
• Summer 2029: The goal: a 10 week internship with a partner firm, the summer after your junior year.
• Spring 2030: You graduate.

How rolling admissions works

We review applications and make decisions every month from October 2026 through June 2027. You will hear back within 4 weeks of the round your application lands in. Seats fill as we go, so the earliest rounds have the most of them open. Apply early.

You get one application

You submit one application for this cohort. Not one per academy, and not one per round. Our Talent & Recruitment team may move you to a different academy than the one you selected if your answers point somewhere else, so you do not need to get that choice perfect.

Every application gets one of three outcomes:

• Accepted. You are in.
• Deferred. We want to see more before we decide, usually your next term of grades. Your application carries forward automatically and you do not need to submit anything new. You will hear from us about two weeks before the next round of decisions, and again every month until we decide. You will not sit in silence.
• Declined. Final for this cycle. Because this program only admits freshmen, we cannot reconsider you in a later round.

Deferral is the reason you can apply in an early round without taking a risk. If we are not ready to decide, we hold your application. We will not turn you away for applying before your first semester was finished.

Deadlines in this process are real. Once you apply, we will ask you for things on a schedule: transcripts, forms, sometimes an interview time. If you miss those deadlines, your application is declined rather than delayed. We hold this line because the program itself runs on deadlines, and how you handle ours tells us how you will handle those.

Please read this carefully: Internship placements are not guaranteed. Greenwood trains you and advocates for you. Those firms make their own hiring decisions. What we guarantee is the preparation, the network, and honest feedback. The offer is something you earn.

Building AI Fluency

Hands on with real tools. You will not just learn concepts. You will build working skill with AI tools used on the job. Each Greenwood academy trains a different technical toolset, chosen to match the roles that academy actually feeds, so what you build here is specific to the operations, risk, and product side of financial technology rather than a general overview.