Straight from college, sure. Professional finance unfortunately involves a lot of inanities like wrestling with data or some process or script or waiting around for something to go on/off or whatever, you get the picture, and kids fresh from college are great for putting through the churn and burn of that. Such hires are mostly just connects and word of mouth in my experience. Math genius? I don't think I ever worked with anyone who would qualify as a bonafide genius. Extremely bright and intelligent people sure but I don' think they were geniuses. I only know two people who I'd qualify as close to genius (in a different field) but man would they be tough to work with on a day to day basis!! If you're looking at purely automated/high freq quant funds, yeah, I don't think you'd get too far with a liberal arts background. However there are still a lot of funds/strategies out there where you'd get in with a basic understanding of math, statistics and some programming.