When hedge funds hire students, they tend to have their pick of the litter, and the pick of the litter tends to pick them in return. At Chicago-based hedge fund Balyasny Asset Management, for example, where the 2026 intern class has just started – the firm has a type.
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Public LinkedIn profiles of approximately 30 Balyasny 2026 summer interns, suggest that BAM likes to hire from Ivy League schools. 40% of interns we spotted went to an Ivy League school. Pennsylvania (including Wharton) is the most popular single source of Balyasny interns, followed closely by Brown. Brown especially is a surprise, providing a number of quant-y students despite its lack of association with hard finance.
In the UK, BAM interns seem to be more represented by Cambridge University than Oxford, despite Oxford’s Alpha Fund (its student investment society) being sponsored by the firm.
Only around 15% of the interns that we saw on LinkedIn are based in the UK, compared to 85% in the USA. That roughly matches what Balyasny disclosed last year – of its 176 portfolio management teams, 17% are based in London, and 63% are based in the USA. The only major region which we didn’t note interns in was APAC, where the firm has 14% of its portfolio management teams.
More than half of the interns we saw are STEM students – the closest among Balyasny interns is a political science student from Duke with an economics “concentration”, but most non-STEM students are studying economics, anyway.
We didn’t see every single Balyasny intern, of course. There were around 80 in total last summer, of which 40 converted their internship into a job at the firm, out of 16,000 applicants in total. That conversion rate – of 0.5/0.25% – was even more brutal than Goldman Sachs or JPMorgan’s 0.7%.
Balyasny Asset Management declined a request for comment on this article.
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