In a hotel ballroom overlooking the South China Sea, 24-year-old Taylor sits with 13 other university students in hoodies and sneakers coding away on laptops during their school break.
“There’s only a finite pool of truly exceptional students,” says Kristina Martinez, Citadel’s managing director in charge of human resources in Asia-Pacific. “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.”
A computer science major at the National University of Singapore, she moved to the city-state from Hebei, China when she was about 14 to attend high school after aceing a test for gifted students. The students are split into groups, with each assigned a Citadel staffer to provide guidance but not answers. Over the next few hours, they are expected to create algorithms to hedge their risk and identify arbitrage opportunities, part of the training to help them understand the market-making process.
To be fair, the students aren’t flying blind. Citadel brings in professional trainers to groom them, with exercises that include writing an email to a boss by condensing a rambling, 163-word note down to fewer than 60 words. “Gone are the days when interns did dog work,” he says, adding that if the internship goes well, “it’s a great sales tool to get other students at the same schools interested.”