Does going to a target school really help you?

Let's see. If I'm reviewing resumes where 1 person goes to Amherst / Princeton / Dartmouth / Duke and has essentially the same profile as someone else going to Washington State / Arizona State / Texas Tech, guess which applicant I am going to select.

Not to mention if you go to a non-target your alumni network will be a lot weaker.

Yeah. I go to a non-target and through my friend I have access to Wharton's career portal. The difference is so big it's laughable.

I got to a non-target, even having trouble getting an interview with a Big 4

I go to a Big Ten non-target (although not a weak school by any means). If you're trying to go to NYC, you have a good shot at a bunch of MMs and 2 or 3 EBs. 3 BBs actively recruit on campus, and we have alumni at 2 or 3 others where you can get an interview if you network your ass off and have a killer resume. The remaining BBs won't answer your phonecalls or glance at your resume. We place a lot better in Chicago where everyone has a solid chance at most banks barring 1 or 2 BBs if you network enough.

I'd say this is fairly representative of a non-target (but still a good school) recruiting experience.

NuclearPenguins pick the Texas Tech grad, I hear those guys know how to party.

In my experience, people who say undergrad prestige does not matter that much are kids from non target. Never seen anyone from target saying that kinda stuff. No offense, just saying.

As someone who went to a "target school" I think it gives you a huge advantage, but not really in the way you discussed.

In my opinion, the biggest advantage it gives you is margin of error. Let's say your goal is BB IBD. The right candidate, with the right plan, and the right execution can land that job from functionally any school. However, one mistake can change everything. For example, non-target student has a 4.0GPA, amazing ECs, networks like crazy, finally gets that one interview, but from nerves makes a costly mistake and doesn't get the job. The dream is not dead, but that is a tremendous setback. Contrastingly a target student with a 3.68 GPA, good ECs, and solid networking will probably have several interviews through OCR, so if they mess up one, they have others. I personally feel having that margin of error is a huge advantage.

That advantage might be more pronounced when it comes to jobs that aren't MBB/BB IBD level competitive that or the most part require you to be top of your class no matter where you go. For pretty much any other job, being middle of the pack at a "target" is equal to being top of your class at any other school. I, personally, got more B's than A's at a Target. At my first job the incoming class had students from what seemed like every university under the sun. However, there was one, maybe two people from each non-target and they were all top students with excellent resumes. Contrastingly, target schools had numerous representatives, several of which didn't have jump anywhere near jump off the page resumes and/or GPAs the non-target kids had.

Moral of the story, going to a target school doesn't guarantee you GS TMT IBD, and going to a non-target doesn't mean you will be living in a van down by the river. However, when it comes to landing that first job, you have much more room for error coming from a target.

Yes, in every possible way. There is no greater signal of competence.

Yes, there is a huge difference. I am currently at a non-target school, and there is a bulge bracket firm that takes only one student from my university. When I talked to the alumni at our school why that was the case, he simply responded with, "because the rest are for Harvard students."

There are spots at many different banks that are only dedicated to target students. Further more, the alumni has said that the interviewing process is different for non-target and target students at his firm, with non-target students receiving more difficult technical questions.

Absolutely. They get more opportunities for resume drops and a higher likelihood of having alumni in the finance field at elite firms. Of course us non-target (and I even went to a LAC) people could still have had a shot, target schools stream line it. I only saw a res drop for S&T at Citi and IB at William Blair my entire time during my undergrad. We have to rely almost solely on networking. Good choice on picking a target!

Of course it gives you an advantage, and a very large one at that. That is not to say that breaking into IB from a target is somehow easy or lessened, but going to a target does indeed give you an advantage for several reasons:

1. OCR. This should go without saying, but just going by a pure statistical approach, your chances of receiving an interview are much higher if you have banks coming to you. OCR also demonstrates that banks WANT to (maybe even have to depending on how many senior bankers went to your school) hire kids from your school.

2. Alumni network. I went to a non-target which at the time had one alumnus at a reputable IB. IBers receive tons of networking requests, and let's be honest, when you're short on time, who will you respond to: the alumnus or the non-target kid? Also, being an alumnus from the same school gives IBers whom you network with a reason to go to bat for you (increases their own brand as more and more of their fellow alumni make it to IB).

3. Pre-screening. Everyone at HSW is smart and capable of doing IB. While the top 10% at a non-target are probably smart and capable of doing IB, IBs don't know this. IBs are VERY risk-averse, so they'd rather hire the HSW kid who they know will be smart instead of the non-target kid who probably is smart and capable of doing IB.

4. Pedigree. This applies more so to smaller banks who may list the analyst in the "deal team" page of a pitch or on their website, but banks and clients do very much care about pedigree. There's nothing sexy about a non-target, but it does sound cool if your entire deal team went to HSW.

Again, you breaking into IB from a target doesn't make you any less of anything or devalue what you've achieved. Just understand that you do in fact have an advantage.

Either the OP 1. A troll 2. Dead serious.

If the latter, OP has no idea how the world works. "Target" can be applied across all industries/walks of life. For example, there will be more NBA scouts at an Oak Hill Academy basketball game than any other local high school in your area. Why? because Oak Hill attracts the most talented basketball players in the country. The same say that Harvard/Yale/Stanford attract the most "talented" students in the world. From a college perspective, think 'NBA Scouts' equals Goldman, Bridgewater, etc.

A foundational aspect of human nature is that people bond over shared experiences. Going to church, playing on the same team, that time you got drunk lit a paper bag of shit on fire. Now consider this -

Interviewer: "So where'd you go to school" Interviewee: "I went to Upenn, graduated this past may" Interviewer: immediately thinks to self Oh wow small world, I also went to Upenn we now have 5,000 similar experiences we can talk about

Fast forward, turns out they were in the same house and the interviewer used the bang the big big big of the interviewee's girlfriend. See?

Or may they were both on the quidditch team, who knows.

Here is a quick way to test it. 1. Go to LinkedIn 2. Search "investment banking analyst" at the bulge brackets 3. Scroll through page after page of Wharton, Harvard, Princeton, 4. Cry yourself to sleep 5. Wake up tomorrow and get after it.

This is basically a situation in which you won't know unless you are actually in those people's shoes. Though I may not have as much experience compared to others on this site, I will say that seeing a target school near the top of one's resume already gives me a good impression of the person. Of course, just because you're from a non-target doesn't mean you're any worse than the target person, but some care so much about the rep of the school that it may really make a big difference.

I did undergrad at a non-target and a Masters at a target. The difference between the two is night and day. At a target you have a ton of alums to the point where it wasn't reach out to anyone at a given bank I almost always had the luxury to choose city, product and oftentimes even specific group. At a non-target you are lucky to have someone in a given division.

Also, at a target opportunities come to you. OCR is a boon to you as it requires de minimus effort and often you can get interviews by just dropping a resume.

I've interviewed kids from targets and non-targets. In most cases, the target kids have far more professional polish, have a better idea what they are interviewing for and how to pitch for it. Non-target kids can be smart and have potential, but as an interviewer I generally have to spend much more effort and time mining the candidate, clarifying my questions etc to work out if the smarts and potential is there. In target school candidates, any smarts and talent comes to the surface a lot more rapidly because the rest of the interview tends to be more efficient.

When it comes to performance in the workplace, I've found target kids also have more polish from day one and I don't have to spend as much time sanding back the rough edges.

"Some schools have BB that come and recruit but you can still network through cold emailing and whatnot."

i.e. recruiters spoon-feed kids from target schools while non-targets are completely on their own.

You would see the obvious difference if you were on the other side. I am coming from a non-target myself and had to complete 3 internships and make 70+ applications to get a single interview (it happened to be at a BB). Then I came on the program at that BB and most of the kids there had zero internships under their belt, yet they all came from target schools.

I nominate this for Captain Obvious Thread of 2016.

what kind of question is this?

Dude how did you get into a target school with such a lack of common sense?

As someone who went to what most on this board would consider a "top target", I just wanted to make a few comments...

1) For banking and consulting, there are more slots reserved for target students, but as a target student, you also need to push in front of many qualified classmates in order to interview or to get a final round. When I interviewed, mostly target students were compared against other target students, at least for the first few rounds.

2) As a target student, your resume will definitely be read by someone, and usually someone who understands your educational background. As a target student, you will likely have friends across the street who can put in a good word, but this goes for most target students so doesn't really make you competitive against other target applicants.

3) One of the biggest benefits coming from a target background is that you don't need to have a background in finance.

4) The GPA cut offs really don't differ between decent non-target schools and target schools. Almost all successful applicants for top BB IBD / S&T or MBB have GPAs above 3.8. I have taken classes at three universities, including my target. It might just be my experience, but I found it was much easier to do well at the other colleges despite less favorable curves. In short, you still need to do very well for top employment opportunities coming from a target, and it is hard to get those grades, despite grade inflation.

5) Some top schools don't have recruiting for each BB, because some BBs think it's not worthwhile coming, or the bank got blocked by the careers office.

6) My classmates who ended up at GS / MS / JPM IBD or S&T were, for the most part, exceptional. We're talking 3.95+ GPAs / topping majors / interesting and extremely challenging academic and extracurricular experiences (makes me feel quite shabby about my own resume at times!). Of course, there are exceptions.

7) A lot of target students don't really know what they're getting into and quite a few of my friends resigned a few months in.

In short - there are more opportunities to interview coming from a target and your resume will always be seen. This does make a difference. However, if you want a top firm, you're going to need to do really well. That's not as easy as many people here would make it seem.

Without a doubt, going to a non-target hurts your chances of getting the job. Of course there are levels. U Michigan is a different situation entirely from Bama.

In interviews, it was immediately clear to me that few hiring managers took me seriously despite my extensive academic accomplishments. My thesis adviser's mentor was literally Milton Friedman and my thesis has since been viewed and used by institutions around the world (including the ECB and a few large IBs), but I couldn't get anyone to care when it came to actually getting a job which would mostly involve PowerPoint and Excel. I have friends that went to a target school, took much easier classes than me, did maybe 50% of the work I did, and received incredible job offers. It's just the way it works. My fault--I should have considered that when I was making school decisions.

With that being said, the top kids from those schools understand that they have to be literally perfect everywhere else in order to make it. I killed my interviews and so did the other kids I know from non-targets who made it.

As far as the actual education goes, I'll take my non-target over most of the Ivy Leagues. My curriculum was more difficult, all my professors had PhDs from top 10 schools, and I developed much more quantitative skills than I would have developed at some of the top schools. But everyone knows that you don't go to an Ivy League undergrad (in Economics) for the education, you go for the connections.