Balyasny's quant research head to interns with no return offer: "Learn to suffer successfully"
Getting into a firm like Jane Street or Citadel through lucrative internship programs is an arduous task. The oft-unspoken heartache, however, is that many of these internships don't convert to full-time offers. In a thread today on Twitter/X, Balyasny's head of quantitative research, Giuseppe Paleologo, empathised with those who weren't called back.
"Finance is built out of being right only slightly more than being wrong." Paleologo said. "You don't learn how to succeed, you just learn how to suffer successfully."
Paleologo advised rejected interns to apply to a wide range of firms. You shouldn't apply only to "second tier firms," neither should you exclusively court "Shaw and Jane." He also said not to "disdain external recruiters", who he said had referred him to jobs at the likes of hedge funds Citadel and Millennium that he didn't know existed.
When you're trying to break into the financial services industry, you will be rejected from many of the places you apply for; Paleologo said to learn from these rejections, and evaluate the specific roles you're aiming at. For example, if you routinely receive rejections for AI roles, "maybe you should not be doing AI." Paleologo said his colleagues have transitioned into a number of different roles including COOs, fundamental portfolio managers and start-up founders.
You also shouldn't write yourself off for not being picked first. "some/all of the best people I have hired or inherited were not obvious superstars, but underdogs, who were not considered first choices," Paleologo said.
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