Citadel founder Ken Griffin’s hunt for the next tech genius has the billionaire paying a select crop of interns nearly $20,000 a month to participate in an 11-week “math boot camp.”
The Miami-based investment giant accepted less than 1% of nearly 70,000 college students who applied for the intensive program, according to Bloomberg.
The in-demand interns — whose services are also sought by blue-chip companies like Meta, Alphabet and ByteDance — got signing bonuses, living stipends, access to corporate housing and pay packages that are on par with those of full-time employees.
The lucky few selected by Griffin’s lieutenants were sent to one of the company’s offices in Chicago, London, Hong Kong, Singapore, New York or Miami to either work at Citadel, the hedge fund with $59 billion in assets under management, or Citadel Securities, the technology-based market maker.
“There’s only a finite pool of truly exceptional students,” Kristina Martinez, Citadel’s managing director in charge of human resources in Asia-Pacific, told Bloomberg.
“Because of the complexity of what we do and the fact that companies that intersect with us will be looking at the same people, we need to get in early.”
The interns simulate what it’s like to be an actual hedge fund trader, according to Bloomberg.
They also write code and think up ways to automate strategies that entail absorbing information and data — skills that require students to demonstrate exceptional abilities beyond the norm.
“The person who’s just kind of awesome at academics, but has not done something above and beyond and not really demonstrated excitement around something, that’s probably not the candidate who’s going to thrive,” Martinez told Bloomberg.
“You’re assessing on potential” because “the problems that they face here, it’s not that we really know the answer either,” she said.
In addition to math and computer skills, interns must demonstrate leadership capabilities while getting along with colleagues, showing curiosity, and accepting feedback.
“Unlike job interviews, the intern program is packed with real-time problem solving, social, learning and highly interactive activities,” said Martinez.
“There are no surprises by the end of the process.”
The company also trains the interns to perfect certain soft skills by having a coach teach them to condense a 163-word email down to fewer than 60 words, according to Bloomberg.
The interns are also taught to introduce themselves in a video taped segment in which they need to project their voice and amplify their message while communicating their intent in a clear and concise manner.
The three-month evaluation period gives Citadel and Citadel Securities an opportunity to line up potential hires, though Martinez cautions that only “the truly outstanding” have what it takes to get a job offer.
Gifted interns who are deemed worthy of full-time job offers are contacted within weeks after the program ends, according to Bloomberg.
“Usually very early on in the internship you can identify the stars, the truly exceptional ones and this is when we tell the managers to go learn everything about who they are as individuals,” Martinez said.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
