University of Florida - Opinions?

Everyone on this board has a great time giving their opinion about absolutely everything. Therefore, I want to know your opinions of the University of Florida? We are a top 50 school academically, nationally recognized, and NCAA champions in both basketball and football. That said, very few Wall Street firms target UF for recruitment. Is it because weâ€re too far south?

I want to know how Wall Street and Ivy League Students view UF.

 

I go to an Ivy, but am from abroad. I see UF as being a "party school" with a lot of surf safety majors. It does not have the international prestige in my mind of the Ivys or Stanford, MIT, Duke, Chicago, Northwestern and Berkely. I know there are some great and smart kids but I am not sure how academically challenging the school is. Wall street needs to know you have faced tough challenges?

 

UF is a decent school. It would see much greater recruitment, but it is SO far away from New York City that the distance is the primary reason why so few Wall St. firms target UF.

With that said, I don't know how their business school is but if you really network like crazy and take advantage of your opportunities, UF should be able to get you in somewhere.

 

academic quality.

That's certainly a large part of it, but proximity is a big one. How many alumni already work for the banks. Also, if you go to top schools, they are going to have a much better alumni network of people who will one day be CEO's of clients.

A lot of it is just tradition, habit, and of course, cost.

There's probably at least one person at every university in the US who is capable of being an investment banker, but statistically it's a lot easier and cheaper to fill a class from schools who have a lot of students who are historically capable of being bankers.

P.S. The chicks are hot at Florida too!

 
gekko44:
UF is just too easy to get into, the kids arent smart enough, and the level of academics isnt high enough

granted, being far from nyc doesnt help

UF is hard as hell to get into from out of state... ridiculous, they only take like 8% of students from out of state...

Note: recruiting sucks, though... It's expected, that far down south...

 
Greedy Gilmore:
gekko44:
UF is just too easy to get into, the kids arent smart enough, and the level of academics isnt high enough

granted, being far from nyc doesnt help

UF is hard as hell to get into from out of state... ridiculous, they only take like 8% of students from out of state...

Note: recruiting sucks, though... It's expected, that far down south...

Stop blaming it on geography. I don't care how hard UF is to get into out of state - it is a mediocre state school.

 
Funniest

That means crap. Most BBs recruit from 20 schools at most. At UF, you have to get in line behind all the Ivy League schools, private schools like Duke, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, NYU, W&L and a bunch of others that I can't think of right now, plus you're behind other state schools like UCLA, UC Berkeley, Michigan, Texas, UNC, Wisconsin, Illinios, UVA . . . . You're fighting an uphill battle, to say the least. On the flip-side, you're probably the most likely person on this board to have partied with future Maxim models last night. So you got that going for you . . . which is nice.

 
Bondarb:
...if u can get me a date with a girl who has been in Maxim I will fly down to florida to go out with her and I will get you a job when you graduate. I am not kidding.

She's dating a Mets player and incidentally moving to NYC around the same time as me this summer to be with him. Went with her and other friends to NYC two weekends ago, and for a college schmuck I felt like quite a baller partying with Mets players and their groupies - I even convinced one particularly intoxicated one that I was the backup third baseman.

I already have a job, but I can always use another wing-man willing to validate my BS stories, so jet down to Port St. Lucie for Mets spring training in March and I'll show you all the groupie action you could handle.

 
WizardofOz:
you got a shot if your name is tim tebow or joakim noah.

of if you look like Jenn Sterger..oh wait she's FSU.

Damn, this board is hilarious... When your down, always go on IbankingOasis. hahaha
 

Gekko doesen't know what he is talking about... I don't like UF, but it's not easy to get into... It's a great school academically. Although, the business school is mediocre. Gainesville recruiting is not cutting it...

 

Greedy Gilmore...why don't you like UF? Is it because the girls are too HOT for you? There really isn't any reason not to like UF. I wish the banks would give us a chance!

 
gators13:
Greedy Gilmore...why don't you like UF? Is it because the girls are too HOT for you? There really isn't any reason not to like UF. I wish the banks would give us a chance!
Hahaha too hot for ME! HAHAHAHA Yeah, that's why I hate UF. NOT! I'm referring to sports. I HATE UF! The only reason they got such a high recruiting class this year in football is because that damn nation championship! I WANT A PLAYOFF!!!!!!!!!!

BTW: I'm still waiting for a PlayGirl offer to get me out of here.

 

Playboy's top ten party schools! I go to Kelley. We have BBs begging for us, and we're ranked 4th for top ten party schools!

We're so cool, we can do both! UF can just party...

  1. University of Wisconsin-Madison
  2. University of California, Santa Barbara
  3. Arizona State University
  4. Indiana University
  5. San Diego State University
  6. Florida State University
  7. Ohio University
  8. University of Georgia
  9. University of Tennessee
  10. McGill University
 

I highly doubt it. The Bottom line is Invesment Banking recruiting at University of Florida is extremely poor.

The school is simply too far from New York City, too easy to get into and not academically challenging enough for the banks to want to recruit at.

 

i agree with iambateman. out of 120 analysts in my analyst class at arguably a top 3 BB, not 1 was from indiana. i also am pretty sure that it is the ibanking honors program at indiana that attracts the banks that do come. through this program, indiana has done a lot of the weeding out already. i hardly think 15 indiana students recruited by Bear justifies the claim that BBs beg for you guys.

 

Roller4life...I bet if we take the top 10% of students at UF, they would compete with any Ivy League student in terms of intelligence, drive, ambition, etc. The problem is that UF is much larger, so we also have students who are weaker academically (although these students are still relatively smart because the high academic standards of UF).

 

Aala the main reason is the mediocre academics at University of Florida. Also the fact that it is overshadowed by other states schools like Michigan, Virginia and North Carolina doesn't help its case.

When you combine mediocre academics, with the fact that there are other state schools which recruiters would MUCH rather go to and the huge distance from New York to Miami you get UF.

A mediocre state school with some smart kids but because of the factors mentioned above the Ibanking recruiitng SUCKS.

 

Zala the main reason is the mediocre academics at University of Florida. Also the fact that it is overshadowed by other states schools like Michigan, Virginia and North Carolina doesn't help its case.

When you combine mediocre academics, with the fact that there are other state schools which recruiters would MUCH rather go to and the huge distance from New York to Florida you get UF.

A mediocre state school with some smart kids but because of the factors mentioned above the Ibanking recruiitng SUCKS.

 

my program obviously had nobody from uf.

gators, your claim that the 10% from UF matches any ivy league student is ridiculous. I am sure there are a bunch of qualified IB candidates at UF, the thing is banks dont wanna go through thousands of resumes to find a diamond in the rough

 

I am so fucking tired of hearing the ivy kids and the IU kids(are you kidding me!) talk about how smart they are and how they are the only ones who can do an adequate job as analysts. Lets be real, IBanking is not rocket science, and we are not doing anything incredibibly innovative like curing cancer. I will admit that from top to bottom the top private universities may have more talented people, but there are intelligent people all over the place. The truth is that the banks have no reason to recruit other state schools when there are so many universities within an hour or two of NYC. It just isn't cost effective to travel the country looking for talent. Another factor is that many of the kids at the state school have no desire to move to NYC or the northeast. Being from the south I have no desire to move to the bitterly cold northeast. The weather and the cost of living are huge turn offs. Just my two cents.

 

Going off what bwils said, I would be willing to bet that kids at Georgia Tech are 10x smarter than any Ivy Leaguer. Sure, some may not have the personality for banking, but from some of the SAT scores I've heard of, we should be more than competitive. Opinions of GT? I think we are a top 10 engineering and public school, not sure though. Obviously faces the same distance factor that UF does, but there's no way that anyone could consider the academics here anything less than extremely rigorous.

 

has solid engineering program and top 10 public school, but I wouldn't say you guys are 10X smarter than ivy league people. Most kids there have sat's of 1400+ at ivy leagues. GT is a easy school to get into, but hard to graduate from. BTW, your business school is not good at all and probably why you get no recruiting. Don't blame the distance. Emory gets some IBs from NYC and they're located in the same city as GT.

 

Agree with the business school. I'm engineering doing a finance certificate (minor) and the classes are easy to the point of being a joke. Maybe I'm just jealous, or pissed, or whatever you want to call it, but I just don't think that even if Ivy Leaguers are just as smart that they go through as intense an academic experience. We are #4 or so on the list of alcoholic schools but don't even rank as a party school-the only one to achieve something like that. I know its part of the business, but I've pretty much given up on any BB I-Banking for the very reason that Ivy Leagues have so much standing when I don't believe it is very deserved. I am personally not impressed by people with a 3.7+ from somewhere like H/Y/P. I may be wrong, but I get the impression that they are a dime a dozen. Anyways, sorry about the rant and don't hold it against me, a couple of scotches and a few beers will do that to you!

 

A few things... with the exception of the rare maxim model, out of the 50,000 (or however big it is) student population at UF, the percentage of hot girls is not on par with Miami and FSU, and although Florida might be the best in the SEC in sports, it definitely isn't the best in girls.

bwils, I agree with the comment about people in the south not really liking the shitty weather, out of control living expenses, and incredible amounts of "non-conservative" north/northeast (and I don't really meant that in a political sense). Out of the very small percentage of people from my SEC school who pursued IBD jobs, two were offered NY jobs (one BB, one MM) and both turned them down for jobs in the south and mid-atlantic. It's just hard for a southern person to imagine making 130k and having to live in a shit apt, when you can make 100k in the south and live in a 2200 sq. foot house and drive a lexus right out of school, while also having warm weather and fresh air.

fraser24gt, the comment about the GPAs at Ivies is something I've been meaning to post about. Going to a state school, I had never heard of such a thing as a "Gentleman's B-" until one of my best friends at Columbia (who has over a 4. GPA) explained to me how it's fairly hard to get a 3.85 or above at an Ivy, but you have to be the absolute laziest person ever to get below a 3.4 at an Ivy because of the grade inflation. He always says the hardest part is just getting into the school. This was reinforced for me this summer when I was having a few beers with the PM and RM of the hedge fund I'm interning at and they explained to me that they have to look at any top school GPA with a minus .5 compared to when they went to school because grade inflation is so high. Both of these guys were Univ of Chicago MBA grads and just said that the tuition is so much more expensive compared to back in the day, that parents have a lot of pull in influencing grade inflation. I'm not trying to say state school is harder (it's not), I just always thought that someone with a 3.4 at an Ivy was doing pretty damn good, but was surprised to hear several people tell me that there's nothing hard about that.

 

I don't go to an Ivy, but I grew up in Princeton my whole life, had close to 20 friends go there from my high school class, and knew a ton of top professors there. The grade inflation in the past was ridiculous, and only recently did they create like a quota system to limit the number of As/A minuses. I'm not sure how it is now, but my friend showed me the email, and it basically stated no more than 30% of a class or something could get A's. In all honesty though, even if it is easier to get A's there, there is still a very intellectual/motivated learning environment.

 

Ah the usual "Ivies are totally grade inflated" argument.

I didn't notice a lot of inflation where I went to school. People worked hard for their grades, A's were deserved and given only to those who had 90+'s for the MOST part (although, to be fair, I was in a hard science major).

The classes I took at state schools (2 different ones in differen states) before freshman year and afterwards were painfully easy. This was the experience of most of my friends as well. In fact, quite a few people would do the the pre-med requirements at Rutgers/SUNY's etc. because they were much harder at the school.

But carry one, the Ivy kids don't deserve their GPAs, grade inflation, rah-rah etc.

 

Yea, I've read some articles on different schools trying to combat the grade inflation. But from my understanding getting A's has always been difficult, but it's the reluctance of Professor's to give out C's (hence the gentleman's B-) that was the biggest grade inflation problem. I totally agree that it is still a very intellectually stimulating environment and you are surrounded by mostly smart people. Are there people that are smart at my state school and could have went to an ivy? Yes, but there are also a lot of dumb students that are lucky they graduated high school. I don't think any truly dumb students make it into an ivy, ever.

 

Edit: Wtf happened to my post? Anyhow, trying this again:

First, UF girls (where pretty much all of my high school went) are not nearly as hot as UMiami girls from what I've seen.

Second, I'd be careful about generalizing grade inflation at Ivies. I'm a hard science major who's had to take the majority of my concentration (or major, as the rest of the world likes to call it) courses filled with pre-meds. It sure doesn't make it easy when you need to score on average 1.5 std dev. above the mean on your exams to get an A, especially when the standard deviation is commonly 15-20 points for bio, chem, physics classes and 10 points for math classes. This is also assuming you do well on your problem sets.

 

My point is that getting A's at ivies, is tough, hands down the hardest thing to achieve for any undergrad student. But the serious grade inflation comes from students who should be C students, but get bumped. How many people do you know at an ivy with a GPA of 2.xx? Probably as many as you know with 4.xx (which is not that many), but you know a ton of people with between a 3.0-3.8, which doesn't make sense because if a C is "average" then most ivy students should have a 2.xx opposed to a 3.xx That's what I'm talking about with grade inflation, I'm not saying that a hard science guy can easily pull a 3.9, I'm saying there's a bunch soft science people that should have 2.5's but instead they all have 3.4's Furthermore, my main point is that occasionally on this board you get someone who wants to know what their chances of getting XYZ job and they say they have a 3.3, and then instantly follow with "I know that's low, but I go to Harvard." I'm just saying that whoever thinks their 3.3 will be forgiven because they took hard sciences or math at harvard, that in reality, whether grade inflation truly exists or not, that employers commonly look at at 3.3 and think 2.8. This is what I was told from the top guys at what is considered a top hedge fund in Chicago.

 
Sucker_for_Seers:
My point is that getting A's at ivies, is tough, hands down the hardest thing to achieve for any undergrad student. But the serious grade inflation comes from students who should be C students, but get bumped. How many people do you know at an ivy with a GPA of 2.xx? Probably as many as you know with 4.xx (which is not that many), but you know a ton of people with between a 3.0-3.8, which doesn't make sense because if a C is "average" then most ivy students should have a 2.xx opposed to a 3.xx That's what I'm talking about with grade inflation, I'm not saying that a hard science guy can easily pull a 3.9, I'm saying there's a bunch soft science people that should have 2.5's but instead they all have 3.4's Furthermore, my main point is that occasionally on this board you get someone who wants to know what their chances of getting XYZ job and they say they have a 3.3, and then instantly follow with "I know that's low, but I go to Harvard." I'm just saying that whoever thinks their 3.3 will be forgiven because they took hard sciences or math at harvard, that in reality, whether grade inflation truly exists or not, that employers commonly look at at 3.3 and think 2.8. This is what I was told from the top guys at what is considered a top hedge fund in Chicago.

I am sorry, that's just not true.

The idea that a 3.3 in hard sciences from Harvard is seen as a 2.8 is ludicrous. The clearest counterpoint to this is the fact that most banking and consulting employers will take a 3.4 from Harvard vs. a 3.9 from a state school. In fact, there are a LOT of 3.1-3.5 kids at Ivies who get banking jobs. The same isn't true at other schools where even 3.7-4.0's have a tough time getting interviews.

I know some kids with a GPA. Most Ivies have median grades at 3.3, which is roughly a B+. The grade distribution is fairly standard, with a good number falling below that. Why should soft science people have 2.5's? In my classes I never saw an out-and-out retard/slacker. Everyone did the work, some did better than others. Pretty much everyone deserved their grade.

Where did this idea of a gentleman's C come from? You should tell that to the profs at my school, because I was in multiple classes with medians of C and below.

I think your source at the top hedge fund is mistaken, because reality simply doesn't bear that out. Pretty much anyone on this board who went to a target/Ivy can back up my statement.

Also, the distribution of students at top schools simply isn't the same as at other students. Most students are extremely smart and committed. It make no sense to establish some artificial curve to give someone a B- if he/she had a 95+ on every test.

The issue of grade inflation is seriously overblown. Most of my friends did extremely overblow and could have gotten near perfect grades had they gone to their local schools or state schools. In fact, they did get perfect grades when they attended those schools for summer classes etc. Heck, I wish my school gave us transfer credit for the classes I took at my state school. It would bump up my GPA by 0.15!

 

Maybe the buyside guys I've met in Chicago are an anomaly and they just don't care as much about prestige as BB banks (hence they would rather recruit a star from a state school and careless about prestige than a bank who would rather hire someone with a more prestigious background but less concerned with GPA). The fund I intern at has a lot of guys who went to a state school for undergrad (target state school though), but everyone with an MBA here is from a target MBA. Anyway, I'm just telling you what was mentioned to me.

Consultant, don't forget that most target schools have easier times getting interviews (even if they have a 3.2) because they have tons of banks recruiting right on campus. Whereas the state school students usually have to get someone to put their resume in the "read me" pile to get an interview. Once they get in that pile though, their chances seem to be pretty good (all my friends older than me seemed to get the jobs they wanted). So yea an ivy might get an interview easier than a big state school kid, but it doesn't mean the grade inflation for C-B range doesn't exist.

 

As a northerner who went to grad school at UF, It was astonishing how much of a networking boost they have down there. Warrington especially is gorgeous, I went to hough, had some of the same professors and they were fantastic and had good contacts. I will say if you are looking for IB outside of FL, you have to set your sights higher. I was told flat out by some of the people in the administration that my complaints about the lack of connection with GS, MS or JPM needed to be remedied, especially as we have willing alumni high up in all of those orgs. Just be aware you are going to have to go at it a bit at the career fairs and work harder as a top student in a 46K student school to get the attention of a recruiter than as the 3.9 at the small school. if you get anywhere near close to that at UF, you will get pursued (mostly by KPMG and Deloitte) from the big 4. and UF does have an accelerated schedule to let you compile undergrad and a MAcc in 4 years. It is a cult mentality, but when you tell people you are a gator (or my case double gator) alumni look at it like you just told them you shit rainbows and they believe you.

 

Great school for parties. What else do you need to know?

UF is such a large school, you're going to need to be a little more specific about what school/program/whatever you're interested in. From a general, undergrad, standpoint, UF is the best public school in Florida. Because of the way Florida (the state) gives out scholarships, UF becomes extremely competitive in-state admissions; the smartest kids who can't afford to go out of state are all at UF. I can't tell you how out of state recruiters would look at it, though, but if you're trying to stay in Florida I imagine most recruiters would look at it favorably.

 
Leonts:

Any opinions on UF?

With Driskel benched, Treon Harris will have to take over. He is a little more mobile, but is lacking experience and accuracy in the passing game. Look for Harris to lean on the run game, which is averaging 176 yards per contest. He won't expect to get much help from the defense, which is giving up an average of 22.2 points per game, good for 9th best in the SEC. All-in-all, expect UF to drop at lest 2-3 more games this year while looking to rebuild for the 2015 campaign.

Also, look for FSU to drop about 70 on them. Go Noles.

 

^^ Go Noles. Also FSU>UF from an undergrad Business School perspective. UF is stronger academically everywhere else but that doesn't make up for Gville being the armpit of America with heinous looking women.

 

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If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses - Henry Ford
 

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