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- Hedge fund Citadel selected 300 candidates from a pool of 69,000 applicants for its summer internship.
- These interns are flown out to luxury hotels and make over $19,000 a month.
- They are assessed on everything, from their coding abilities to communicating skills, per Bloomberg.
Hedge fund Citadel and trading firm Citadel Securities run a highly-coveted summer internship program that runs for 11 weeks. It is an understatement to say it's tough to get in.
In 2023, only 300 candidates were picked from a pool of 69,000 applicants. The internship was scheduled to start in June.
As part of the summer program — where interns are paid $120 an hour, or roughly $19,200 a month — they are treated to luxury stays and eats, alongside training and exposure to Citadel executives, Bloomberg reported on Tuesday.
Beyond trading simulations and working with company staff on projects, interns are taught skills one might not typically associate with the work of a trader.
According to Bloomberg, Citadel brings in professional trainers to help them better communicate. They do exercises like condensing a long, rambling email to their boss to a short one or reviewing recordings of self-introductions to work on their delivery and how they project their voice.
They also get to put those lessons into practice during networking dinners with senior Citadel executives at swanky restaurants.
And it's not all about work.
During Citadel's summer programs, interns lodge at upscale hotels like Hong Kong's Fullerton Ocean Park Hotel, a Citadel spokesperson told Insider on Tuesday.
These students mostly come from prestigious universities, and Bloomberg listed Stanford math doctorates and math Olympiad prizes as some of the achievements under these interns' belts.
But good numeracy is just the baseline, Kristina Martinez, Citadel's APAC managing director for human resources, told the outlet. Someone who's academically competent but "has not done something above and beyond and not really demonstrated excitement around something" is unlikely to thrive, she said.
One reason Citadel's pulling out all the stops to woo these students may be because they're competing for applicants from the same talent pool that tech giants Amazon and Meta are drawing on. Amazon interns drew an average monthly salary of $7,809 in 2023, while Meta's interns take home an average of $8,160, according to data from Glassdoor.
And it's obvious why the internship draws prospective traders.
Ken Griffin, the majority owner of Citadel and Citadel Securities, is worth $37 billion, according to Bloomberg's Billionaires Index. Citadel posted its strongest results to date in 2022 when it made about $28 billion in revenue, while market maker Citadel Securities raked in $7.5 billion in revenue.