13 Comments
 
CashCowCitadel's culture has a horrible reputation. I'm surprised positions there would be that highly sought after.

I've heard bad things about the culture, mainly that it's extremely competitive and has a high turnover rate. But it's still a great place to work for a few years, especially if you're an analyst in the ITAP program. You learn a lot, make great money, and citadel is a great name to have on your resume. And you can live EXTREMELY well in Chicago with the money you make there, due to the city's lower cost of living.

 
Best Response

You can say that every major finance firm has a "bad" culture. Moving up is competitive and turnover is high no matter where you are - how many investment banking analysts, consulting analysts, etc. stay after 2 years? Very few. Citadel is not much more competitive. A job there is highly sought after because the pay for new grads is almost double the pay at traditional i-banks, and moving up is more meritocratic and less structured (there are 27-year olds who are desk heads).

As for the original question, Citadel's post-MBA class is very small - I think at max 5 people per year, although that number may have gone up recently. College grads are all either in ITAP or FTAP - ITAP is much smaller, about 3-4 people per year, FTAP has around 12-15.

 
ews09You can say that every major finance firm has a "bad" culture. Moving up is competitive and turnover is high no matter where you are - how many investment banking analysts, consulting analysts, etc. stay after 2 years? Very few. Citadel is not much more competitive. A job there is highly sought after because the pay for new grads is almost double the pay at traditional i-banks, and moving up is more meritocratic and less structured (there are 27-year olds who are desk heads).

As for the original question, Citadel's post-MBA class is very small - I think at max 5 people per year, although that number may have gone up recently. College grads are all either in ITAP or FTAP - ITAP is much smaller, about 3-4 people per year, FTAP has around 12-15.

Insane if the ITAP class is really that small. Citadel probably gets at least 1000 resumes each year for that group. They recruit at all the top undergrads.

 

I think ITAP was larger in past years, but not by much. And FYI, I heard they just got rid of the ITAP program completely, meaning new grad traders are placed into a desk right away without coursework and rotations.

 
ews09I think ITAP was larger in past years, but not by much. And FYI, I heard they just got rid of the ITAP program completely, meaning new grad traders are placed into a desk right away without coursework and rotations.

i heard they got rid of ITAP as well. i guess it's because of the huge losses they took in 2008. the ITAP training was really good; they would bring in professors from kellogg and uchicago business to teach courses.

 

Wow, I thought most people in the business didn't really believe in the theories professors teach, even at top business programs. Guess I was mistaken.

 

Booth gets recruited for the every single major quant funds i.e. AQR, Citadel, RenTech, De Shaw. They have a ridiculous roster for teachers all groundbreaking research such as EMH and CAPM

 

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