Yuqing Xie’s team took second-place and will share in the $25,000 award for winners, who will have a chance to interview for a job at Citadel. Xie said the datathon brought together her twin interests in technology and finance.
“Data science and tech are the future, and everyone’s trying to integrate them,” said Xie, 24, who’s getting a masters in financial engineering at MIT. “Citadel is doing a very good job of combining both and that’s exactly the combination I’m interested in.”
Eric Munsing, a Ph.D. candidate in civil engineering at the University of California at Berkeley, was part of the winning team at Citadel’s first datathon in January. He said the event drew many students with a passion for the complicated computational problems of data science who may not have even considered the possibility of a career in finance.
“The datathons are a really interesting way of opening people’s eyes to alternative career paths,” Munsing, 30, said. “For me it certainly does seem like an attractive potential path.”
Grand Prize
While his friends in the engineering department look to work at Google and Amazon, where they might focus on narrow technical issues like optimizing advertising, Munsing is drawn to the broader challenges of finance -- how trends and people’s emotions impact markets.
“I’m more interested in finding the most intellectually stimulating problems, and then seeing where that leads me,” said Munsing.
Citadel will hold 16 more events this year at an array of schools, from the University of North Carolina to the University of Cambridge. The winners will compete again in a final face-off at the end of the year. Victors take home $100,000 in cash.
Citadel’s motive for its extensive recruiting effort is made plain on its website. It lists some 90 job openings worldwide, from quant researchers to software engineers.
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.