There's a new way to land an internship at Millennium: be an AI superstar

Millennium considers a select group of employees “change agents” — and they’re not top portfolio managers or senior executives.

Instead, those tasked with transforming the firm from within are summer interns on a new AI track, a program that’s part of a broader effort among top hedge funds to invest in young employees. “Doubling down on early career talent and the age of AI is important,” said Mallory Triano, Millennium’s global head of campus recruiting. “It obviously was a strategic decision for Millennium to really focus on bringing those that have native AI fluency and innovation.” The new track is part of a broader expansion, as Millennium’s internship program doubled to more than 200 people from 2023 to 2025.

More than 70,000 students applied for this year’s program, the most on record, and just 0.4% were accepted.

Interns are placed on one of four pathways: quantitative, markets and products, business services, and engineering, with around one-third of the engineering group focused on AI.

While all interns are encouraged to use AI, Millennium decided to set up a dedicated track during internal conversations about the future of talent, Triano said.

Other leading financial institutions, from big banks to rival hedge funds, have also said they want interns who are fluent in the technology, but most don’t offer a dedicated AI pathway.

Triano said applicants distinguished themselves by talking about specific projects they’ve built with AI, how they use AI in their everyday lives, and problems they’ve solved with the technology.

The firm wasn’t just focused on technical talent but also on creativity and judgment, two traits many financial firms say they’re looking for in the AI era (the head of campus recruitment at Citadel told Business Insider that the best intern applicants stand out for their judgment and adaptability).

Like all of Millennium’s summer interns, the AI specialists are integrated into existing teams and operate similarly to junior employees, with access to the same AI tools.

Triano said AI interns are expected to develop new ways to deploy the technology — that could mean finding new use cases, helping teams reimagine their workflows, or simply sparking conversations about the technology. “They are not on the sidelines, they are on the frontlines with the business from day one,” she said about interns generally. “They are receiving structured goals, structured projects, exposure to our senior leaders.” Next summer, Millennium is launching another new offering for hedge fund hopefuls: the investment internship for graduating college seniors.

Between 20 and 30 students have already been selected and will be spread across three locations.

Securing an internship is one of the best ways to land a job at the notoriously competitive firm in a notoriously brutal market, Triano said, since the program is the “main pathway to full time analyst programs” for high-performers.