How to Land a Citadel Quant Role via Datathon
Citadel is a top-tier global hedge fund founded by Kenneth Griffin in 1990, often considered the dream employer for many quantitative professionals.
While Citadel offers various roles for new graduates, an internship is typically a prerequisite. Securing an internship at Citadel is highly competitive; this article outlines key strategies to help you succeed.
We will provide an overview of three primary roles: Investing, Quantitative Research, and Software Engineering, with a specific focus on the Quantitative Research track.
Below, we outline a shortcut to securing a Quantitative Research position and provide essential preparation materials.
Investing Roles
Investing roles are arguably the most difficult to secure but offer exceptional compensation.
2025 undergraduate and master’s interns will receive a weekly salary of $5,300. The first week is spent staying at a Four Seasons hotel, facilitating rapid socialization and team bonding for new hires.
Regarding application requirements, your major and university background are currently less critical. You do not need to be an economics or finance major, but you must have a strong interest in stock valuation.
However, the requirement is "Extraordinary"—a standard that is arguably higher than Harvard’s admission criteria. Citadel claims a 1% acceptance rate compared to Harvard’s 4%. To illustrate this standard, Citadel notes they have hired NASA astronauts.
Therefore, I find it difficult to offer specific advice for this role. However, since Citadel’s screening process involves Wonderlic, if you are serious about applying, I recommend taking a Wonderlic prep course for approximately $50. The Wonderlic Select assessment includes cognitive, psychological, cultural, and logical tests. Such preparation will help you filter out candidates who are unprepared.
Once selected as an intern, Citadel offers an 11-week on-the-job training program designed to accelerate your growth. Successful completion of this program significantly increases your chances of receiving a full-time offer.
Software Engineering Roles
This role is relatively easier to apply for. Citadel has a basic screening process that quickly invites applicants to take the HackerRank test. Since HackerRank is automated, almost everyone who applies receives an invitation.
You may encounter Hard-level LeetCode problems on HackerRank, though some candidates report encountering Easy-level questions. Overall, consistent practice on LeetCode is beneficial. The more thoroughly you prepare, the greater your chances of success.
You can find leaked interview questions for Citadel on Glassdoor or 1point3acres, although most detailed information requires payment.
Quantitative Research and Datathon
Participating in the Datathon and achieving a high ranking is the fastest route to an internship in the Quantitative Research role. Based on historical data (analyzed via valid submission IDs), the number of competitors is relatively low, and there are two opportunities per year.
The competition is hosted by Correlation One. Correlation One was founded by Rasheed Sabar, a former hedge fund manager, and focuses on helping companies develop talent through training solutions.
Their clients include prominent firms such as the Department of Defense (DoD), Amazon, Citadel, and Point72. Likely due to the founder’s professional network, they secured the opportunity to host competitions and recruit for Citadel and Point72. You may also want to explore their training and recruitment programs on their website.
The Datathon is exclusively for current students, requiring a school email for registration. After online registration via the official website, you must complete a 90-minute online assessment. This assessment includes psychological, value-based, and some technical questions.
Results are notified three days before the competition begins. You then enter a networking phase where you must form a team or join an existing one. The Datathon is a collaborative project, typically requiring teams of four.
Once the competition officially begins, you will receive the problem statement and datasets from the organizers (we have collected past questions, datasets, and team submissions on our website; see the link at the end of this article). You must select a problem to research and submit a report within 7 days detailing your findings.
This process may feel unfamiliar to students in mainland China, but for international students, such collaborative tasks and team presentations are common. Therefore, mainland students wishing to participate should practice these skills, as 7 days may otherwise feel insufficient.
Women’s Benefits
In addition to the standard Datathon, there is a dedicated Women’s Datathon. The next session is scheduled for January 10 next year, making now an ideal time to prepare.
Note that this Women’s Datathon is held offline and is limited to students currently enrolled in universities in the United States and Canada.
Datathon Success Strategies
While the Datathon appears to test hard data analysis skills, understanding the rules and mastering team collaboration are equally important. Culturally, Citadel places a strong emphasis on collaboration.
- Team Composition: Ensure all team members use the same programming language. Otherwise, aggregating work results will be impossible.
- Deliverables: Although Citadel does not restrict programming languages or tools, the final report must be in PDF, PPT, or HTML format. If your PDF contains formulas, you must also provide the LaTeX source code. Given the 7-day deadline, you should be proficient with these tools beforehand. Alternatively, ensure your team includes someone with these skills.
- Submission Norms: Since the Datathon is a virtual online competition, there is no live presentation environment. Therefore, you must strictly adhere to the submission guidelines.
- Report Clarity: Due to the lack of a live presentation, your report must be exceptionally clear. Read it multiple times from an outsider’s perspective to ensure that non-team members can form a clear impression of your project.
- Tool Proficiency: Familiarize yourself with Jupyter Notebooks and pandas (if using Python). This is officially recommended, as Notebooks allow for quick exploration of the provided datasets.
- Supplementary Data: Adding external data is beneficial and demonstrates your ability to solve problems outside the given framework. Therefore, familiarize yourself with various datasets in advance. If you need to scrape data, you must be proficient in web scraping, as this is a serial process; other work cannot proceed until the data is acquired.
- Visualization: Visualization is crucial. If you use Python, practice the
matplotlibandseabornlibraries regularly.
We have collected all competition problems, data, questions, and team-submitted reports and code since 2017. If you are preparing for the Datathon, this will be an excellent reference.
Below is a brief introduction to the Summer 2024 Datathon.
2024 Summer Datathon
The 2024 Datathon concluded on August 5. The topic focused on junk food, requiring participants to draw conclusions about US food processing from the provided datasets. In addition to the specified datasets, participants were allowed to add new datasets as needed. However, these additional datasets were submitted to the judges and could not exceed 2GB.
You could choose from the following three topics or propose your own:
- Can restaurant stock prices be predicted from meat production data?
- Does sugar pricing affect young people’s consumption of sugary drinks? If so, are there regional differences in this impact?
- Is there a correlation between dips in meat production and unemployment rates?
Some teams have uploaded their competition datasets, questions, and solutions to GitHub. The table below lists some repositories we have collected, including solutions from teams that ranked highly in previous years. These are highly valuable for study. If you can meet this standard during your practice, you have a high probability of ranking in your own competition.
| year | rank | files | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2024 summer | NA | data, code, report | Reports from two teams; executable |
| 2024 spring | NA | data, code, report | Clear directory structure; high-quality reports |
| 2023 | NA | report, code | |
| 2022 | 3rd | report, code | High-quality reports; excellent visualizations |
| 2021 summer | 1st | data, src, report | Includes Airbnb data |
| 2021 spring | NA | data,code,report | |
| [2020] | 3rd | report | |
| 2018 | 1st | data,code,report | Reports from two teams |
| [2017] | NA | report,code,data |
These competition materials have also been uploaded to our course environment.
If you wish to start practicing immediately, you can apply for access to our course environment. This saves you time on downloading data and setting up environments. We have already debugged the code for the Summer 2024 competition, allowing you to run it while learning from others’ code.