How competitive is 3.7 GPA from WHYP with a very heavy course load?
How competitive is 3.7 GPA from WHYP with a very heavy course load?
How competitive is 3.7 GPA from WHYP with a very heavy course load?
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Um...very competitive?
I'm not sure what answer you are looking for here, but it is obviously a great GPA, from a great school. Are you talking about for I banking?
CC redux?
A 3.7 from Princeton is more competitive than a 3.7 from other Ivies. That being said, a 3.7 from an Ivy is about twice as competitive as a 4.0 at UT.
If I were hiring for S&T and had to choose between a kid from Georgia Tech with a 4.0 in Mech. E and an Art History major from Princeton with a 4.0, I'd take the Mech. E guy, all other things being equal. A 4.0 in engineering at a state school is about two extra standard deviations harder to get than a 4.0 in liberal arts.
Are you kidding me? Liberal arts?
Thank goodness you are not.
Just try not to dump on UT Austin when a 4.0 GPA from many (not all, maybe not even most) programs there means you're probably smarter (at least quantitatively) than someone with a 3.7 GPA from many (again, not all) programs at Princeton.
Not yet (give it another year or two), but people like me but a few years older certainly are. Engineers from state schools have moved up pretty quickly at the BBs since the financial crisis. In any case, UT-Austin, Georgia Tech, Michigan, and Berkeley (along with obviously MIT, CMU, and Stanford) are more selective in most engineering disciplines when it comes to quantitative strengths than the typical liberal arts program at an Ivy.does anyone care about course load?
Troll alert
Sounds like a troll, but will def find something. Really depends if you have a firm business understanding/financial markets etc. Getting hired consists of Academics, Experience, Networking and whether the MD likes you.
The reason I am asking as a sophomore who attend school on full financial aid, I am having hard time getting first round interviews. So far, I only got few interviews. Therefore, I am skittish and asking is it my GPA or is due to lack of connections and not having resources to break into the field.
During my Junior-year internship (again, Capital Markets side, not IBD), most of my fellow interns had previous work experience, but only a handful had them at BBs. Start calling up firms, ask them if they need someone to work for them for $9.50/hour (what I did- at the time, it was the most I'd ever made on an hourly basis in my life), and you'll get another $30/hour worth of resume-building experience in the process.
Don't worry. Just find something to do this summer and you'll be fine for next year.
@illiniprogrammer
wasn't calling you a troll...I was refering to the OP. Not trying to be a d*ck but it's like saying "I wonder if my ferrari is faster than his toyota?" Really?
My point is that yes, some things are more prestigious, but when push comes to shove, other things can be better sometimes. The Chicago prop shops figured that out before the crash, and now New York is catching on, too.
illiniprogrammer,
Princeton has a VERY strong quantitative presence. Correction: Their math graduate program is #1 according to us news.
Princeton's a great program, but it gets left in the dust by a number of state schools when it comes to US News rankings in engineering.
Princeton's algorithms professor would struggle to get a B in Ga Tech's Algorithms course? Are you full of shit?
Technically, math is a liberal art.
More relevantly, Harvard has a top math program. Does that make it not a LA school? The LA is certainly not mutually exclusive with having solid quantitative programs.
Most of the students I met who were hired in from Princeton and Harvard had soft science degrees. Yes; there were some math majors, but most students didn't have strong quant backgrounds. They had a few calc classes, but I don't think most had diffy'qs or even linear algebra. During the analyst training, it was pretty clear who had been working with numbers for the past four years and who hadn't, and I wound up getting conscripted as a tutor for the soft science/arts majors from Ivy League schools.
Back to my original point: In many majors (including ones that fit well for trading), a 4.0 from UT is just as tough to get as a 3.7 from Princeton. Actually, by virtue of more draconian curves and competitive admissions processes, a 3.7 might even be as tough to get at UT as a 3.7 from Princeton in some majors
illini is a joker. i don't go to princeton, but i worked with princtonites over the summer, and even their economics major (math track) is probably as hard as any thing in GA Tech
Is a 36" computer monitor considered big? Would I be able to read the font on my new monitor?
Is bench pressing 600lbs considered a lot? I don't want my friends to think I am a weakling.
If my Roth IRA only has $1 billion dollars in it, could I retire at age 65, or should I work another year?
@illiniprogrammer
I was speaking in general terms Ferraris are faster than toyotas...
of course ppl from HYPS etc could be beaten by non ivy kids... but the general idea is that a 3.7 from HYPS is damn good, and if your not getting a interview/job/whatever it must be something else... to think your not getting interviews b/c your a 3.7 HYPS instead of 3.8 at HYPS is beyond naive...
Does family connections (or wealth) helps in getting a leg up during the recruitment process. Let us say if the person is related to someone bigwig in the Wall Street helps. I am just wondering .........
bean
When you see kids with much lower GPA getting invitation to very plum positions you start to wonder .... and analyze what went wrong…..
I know few of my classmates who took multi-variable calculus and linear algebra in high school. As a freshman in college, they enrolled in higher-level math classes with me. Math is not the issue at all. It is just a sinking feeling that connection can matter so much .....
I think we can all conclude that MIT is the best school in the World and Princeton sucks.
Sweet. Also, ibdgirl1 I hope to God you are trolling us all, because otherwise you're just proving the second part of my earlier point.
hkibd123:
I wish I were trolling. I am in pain with what is happening around me. First time I find myself very disturbed as what I see due to lack of money and ….. .
Relax. You're a sophomore. When you're a junior, you'll get a better internship.
I am seriously in pain with what is happening too.
Princeton has grade deflation. It's something like only 35% in a given class can get As (actually I think it's divided by department).
Think about it. If a class at Princeton hands out 35% As and mostly Bs to the rest of the students, that's a ~3.0-3.3 mean GPA. At most state schools, the mean GPA is a 2.5 in Engineering as a result of the curve used. Professors claim they're being nice because when they were in school, the mean GPA was a 2.0.
I feel like a ton of people on this board completely miss the point when they ask the 'what are my chances' threads.
Bottom line is this: If you go to a target school, yes, your GPA/experience/extracurrics matter, but believe me, the trump card in all instances is your network and if you know someone at the bank who can vouch for you. The target schools, in most instances, are pretty small places. So yes, it definitely helps if you know people and/or have connections. You will ultimately need someone to 'go to bat' for you at the end, especially if you're on the fence.
As someone who used to recruit at a BB for my alma mater, the people reviewing the resumes are comprised of alums from the college (young and old). The senior guys definitely tend to rely on the junior bankers/traders/salespeople/whomever to do a sanity check on the incoming SAs/FTers. When you have 80-100 kids dropping resumes for 10-15 interview positions, it becomes very easy to throw out people who may be perfect on paper, but no one has a clue as to who they are. That being said, we often took a mix of kids we knew/kids we thought were strong. It's definitely important to be well-rounded and alums can usually judge that from the activities you do on campus, courses you take, etc.
Go to a good school. Get Good grades. You'll be fine. You're splitting hairs over nothing. The IVY league is not the be all end all.
HerSerendiptity - ill take off the list for privacy. it just sounded familiar, i also heard a word for email that was unique
ha - spacejam, i shot you a PM/email (or something; not sure what i did). Thanks.
It's great that some of your mathematicians worked on a few of the foundations of computational theory 30 years ago. However, based on this logic, students should study Mathematics in India- where the decimal system was invented- rather than Princeton.
If you want to get into deep discussions about Wuthering Heights and still graduate with an engineering degree, go to a liberal arts school like Princeton, Harvard, Yale, or Brown. If you want to get an engineering degree with all of the rigor required to become a top-notch developer, it's time to think about UT or one of the other schools with a stronger engineering program.
At the end of the day, I don't think UT and Princeton are really competing in the same fields and maybe it's not fair to Princeton to compare the two programs without factoring in the liberal arts. You don't spend as much time learning about Ming dynasty at UT- that time gets spent on putting together BNF definitions of languages. For 45 credit hours of required CS courses, Princeton manages to hold up all right against some of the true engineering programs out there; I just think it makes more sense to rank liberal arts programs separately so Princeton can compete based on the fact that it teaches students the liberal arts more.
It's great that Princeton is teaching financial engineering, but again, Princeton doesn't offer a true quantitative education if students are required to spend half their time taking History, English, and the soft sciences.
That was not the point. The point was your assumption that it is a liberal arts college, when it is a research institution with numerous Nobel Laureates. Name some from the state schools you mentioned... UT? probably quite pitiful...
I think you're talking about recruiting for a tech firm (Google, Microsoft, etc)... or perhaps IB tech
You're right - "if". Unfortunately, it's a totally wrong assumption. What do you mean by "soft sciences"? Financial engineers aside, Math and Physics majors are far better than engineers in inventing and developing quant models.
A quick anecdote to supplement Illini's point. A good friend of mine graduated from one of HYP with a MechE degree. Kid was smart as all hell, graduated summa with something like a 3.9 taking the top-level courses in the department. However, when he went to look for standard engineering jobs, he found himself being beat out by kids from state schools, MIT, CalTech etc. Why? HYP engineering degrees are not considered as rigorous as some state school degrees. Such is life.
For the OP, though this might have sunk in by now, a 3.7 is not what's holding you back, and certainly not your sophomore year. I got a JPM internship my sophomore year with a 3.6 and jackshit in the way of networking. Don't panic now, but start reaching out to older friends who've been going through this process and ask them to look over your resume and give you pointers. If you aren't very involved in campus activities, now's a great time to get involved.
Hmmm....interesting discussion going on here, so long as the OP is in fact not a troll. Will say that from what I've seen, the connections do indeed matter a shi# ton more than even grades or what school you went to or what your courseload was. Sure, you need to meet a certain standard in terms of grades to jump through the initial screen, but beyond that, it's knowing the people who are going to be considering you through your own network. Whether that network comes from Mom/Dad or from your own hustling, the answer remains the same: connections and network matter, arguably more than anything else.
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