Inside one third year student's strategy for getting a Citadel hedge fund internship

Emma Wardle's path to a Citadel hedge fund internship began with deliberate uncertainty. As a third-year electronic and information engineering student at Imperial College London, Wardle applied broadly across 30 positions spanning finance, technology start-ups, and management consulting, keeping her career options genuinely open. When Citadel extended an offer for its London fixed income and macro team, Wardle had minimal financial services experience and limited knowledge of rates and markets—but considerable mathematical foundation from her engineering background.

Citadel's internship structure proved instrumental in onboarding candidates from non-traditional backgrounds. The 11-week summer 2023 program opened with an intensive week at South Lodge, a hotel and spa property in Horsham, Sussex, featuring workshops, team-building exercises, resilience coaching sessions, and social events including a vineyard tour. This offsite approach aims to accelerate cohort integration and provide foundational coaching before office-based work begins. The remaining 10 weeks took place in the London office, where Wardle was paired with both a mentor and manager to execute a real project: designing a new trading strategy for the fixed income desk.

The mentorship intensity at Citadel distinguished it meaningfully from Wardle's prior tech start-up internship. In the start-up environment, she observed that staff were "unbelievably stretched," limiting availability for intern support. At Citadel, structured mentorship and experienced practitioners' accessibility mitigated her steep learning curve around markets and financial instruments. The firm's internship program compensates interns at over $20,000 monthly, reflecting both the premium nature of hedge fund talent acquisition and the expectation that interns will execute work with material firm value.