Andy D. Litinsky ’04, yelling top center and wearing a bathrobe, shows the same fighting spirit during a Harvard-Clarkson hockey game last March that he currently exhibits in the boardroom of NBC’s reality television show “The Apprentice.”

Andy D. Litinsky ’04 left Harvard early last spring with a single suitcase and a plane ticket to New York.

His professor and friend Steven R. Levitsky remembers a curious e-mail he received from Litinsky the night before his departure.

“He said there was something he had to do, but he couldn’t tell us why [he was going],” said Levitsky, who teaches government and social science at Harvard. “It was the classic movie line for someone going off on a secret CIA mission.”

But Litinksy was headed for a mission more challenging than mere CIA work: His task is to last 15 weeks proving himself in NBC’s “The Apprentice,” a gold-gilded world dominated by Donald “The Donald” Trump and the gospel of greed.

The top-rated new show last season is like “Survivor” for the business world, where the winner gets to head up one of Trump’s myriad corporations.

On last Thursday’s season premiere, the 18 competitors assembled in Trump Towers. They eyed their rivals in silence for a few minutes, and then entered the infamous boardroom where contestants get booted off by Donald Trump himself.

“I don’t like going in there and dealing with the fact that someone has to get fired every time,” Litinsky said on TV. “I want to win.”

NBC does not allow contestants to speak to the media until they have been fired.

He wants to see Trump as much as possible, but “not in the boardroom.”

ALREADY A WINNER

Yet in many respects, Litinsky has already beaten the competition. NBC spokesperson Jim Dowd said more than one million people applied for the second season of the show.

He said the show looks for candidates who represent a diversity of business talent, and after interviews and psychological screenings, some candidates fly to Los Angeles for a practice boardroom session with Trump.

The contestants stay in a spacious Manhattan suite of rooms during the shooting, which Litinsky compared favorably to his former set-up at Harvard.

“It’s bigger than my dorm room,” Litinsky said, glancing in awe.

STRUGGLING UPWARD