USC (Marshall) vs UMich (LSA) vs UVa - International Student

I'm a long time lurker here and it's ironic that, having read so many of these types of posts, my first would be to similar effect. But now that I'm actually in the position of picking a college I just thought I'd seek whatever other input I could get.

I'm an international student that aspires to work in IB and eventually PE, and I've been accepted at all of colleges I've mentioned in the title. I haven't actually visited any of these schools and will be doing so in a few weeks before committing.

Without intending to sound conceited, I'm confident of my ability to be admitted into, and work hard to excel at, Ross and McIntire. So for the purpose of this discussion, I'm assuming I'll be graduating from all their undergrad B-schools. What I gather from what I've read thus far, is that UM/UVa have better IB recruiting all around, and particularly so in NYC. However (and obviously this would be verified by my campus visits), I'm fairly certain I'll enjoy LA a lot more than Ann Arbor and Charlottesville for a number of reasons, and that leads me to believe I'll have a better college experience at USC.

I suppose my question really is if that trade off, for a better experience, is worth giving up the better recruiting at UVa and UM. I understand USC is very well represented on the West Coast, but I do hope to work at a BB/EB in NYC after college and it's definitely gonna be a factor if that's gonna be a problem coming from USC, even as a student that does well there. I know my decision shouldn't solely be based off of what improves my chances of landing internships/FT offers, but it's still quite important to me! To clarify, I can see myself enjoying all three schools, but being in LA is just a lot more appealing to me.

Cost won't be an issue at any school. Also, being an international student and requiring a H-1B, are my chances honestly very low if I hope to work in the U.S. (in a field as competitive as IB) after graduating?

I understand this is yet another one of those threads, but I hope for, and deeply appreciate, any input that anyone can offer at this juncture!

EDIT: I'm back from my visit and I decided on committing to USC - just got the best vibes out of it from all three schools and I'm looking forward to college! Really appreciated the perspectives in this thread!

 

Well here are my thoughts...

The context in which you're posing this question is in that of being an international rising freshmen with the long term goal of entering the finance industry in the US.

What I'm seeing here is that the only reason you would choose either UVA or UMich is with the reasoning that you're more likely to gain entrance into the NYC finance industry if you attended one those two schools. Absent of any other factors you have provided, I see no reason other than the one above as to why you should not attend USC.

  1. USC is as good or better of an overall school as UVA or UMich. You will not be lacking any desired qualities of an American education in choosing to attend USC. Hierarchies on this site are obviously different, but USC is objectively the best academic institution you got into out of the three based on reputation, rankings, and selectivity.

  2. As an international student, you hopefully see value in studying in the US beyond purely academic and career pursuits. Los Angeles, California is much more "American" than Michigan or Virginia. If you're the type of person who cares about this kind of stuff, you'd have a lot more stories to tell and things to say about LA than... Ann Abour or Charlottesville.

  3. USC has excellent employment opportunities as a top 25 school in a large city, they're just distributed more broadly across different industries rather than concentrated on finance. If you, for some reason, go off the banking track you have much more flexibility out of a school like USC, in a city like LA.

  4. There are too many uncertainties in your situation... are you going to break into banking regardless of the school you go to? Are you still going to be interested in banking next year? Can you even get an internship or a job on H-1B sponsorship? Are you going to regret becoming a banker in the first place? The only reason you would choose UVA or UMich, as you have stated, would be on the balance of probability of being more likely to land a finance job in NYC. Therefore, if you don't achieve that singular goal, you will come away empty handed. You want to go into finance. Analyze the risk.

Will you get an NYC banking job out of USC? Almost assuredly, no... Will you get an NYC banking job out of UVA or UMich? Highly unlikely anyway. If you go to UMich and you get bad grades your first semester, your chances at banking are gone and you spend the rest of your 3 and a half years filled with regret. Sounds like a nightmare to me. I'd rather undergo an existential crisis in Californian sunshine rather than a desolate East Coast college town. That just might push me over the edge. Hedge your upside. Minimize your downside.

 

Go to Michigan or UVA, they're both better schools than USC even if you don't get into the business school. Don't believe the USNWR private school bias, any legitimate academic rankings that exist for a goal other than selling magazines has UM/UVA well above a regional private school like USC. I can't speak for McIntire, but if you go to Michigan, work really hard, and stay focused you'll get into Ross. It's not exactly a crapshoot for kids that get involved and get good grades. Ross and McIntire kids are all over analyst classes on the street, and USC is almost totally non-represented. When I was in Ross every big bank recruited there and we hired five Ross kids for intern spots this summer. UVA is a target school for us as well and is represented. I don't know anyone in banking in the city that went to USC.

 

Your bias is kind of cringe-worthy... not that I expected much from that name. USNWR is the standard - and the only thing the "real world" cares about, outside of situations in which public school kids would love to say they're higher ranked than Yale, Dartmouth, Princeton, Duke etc. Anyone who has spent a nontrivial amount of time among academics (during which rankings are infrequently discussed) is aware that bias in rankings only ever goes the way of public universities when it comes to overstated importance of state-funded research output facilitated by bloated faculty.

Could you, without looking it up, tell me 3 factors involved in the methodologies of the 'research' rankings you're quoting? Probably not, but I can tell you 3 factors that USNWR bases its rankings off of - selectivity, endowment per student, and faculty-student ratio. Not perfect metrics by any means, but about as close to an objective measurement you can get for the value of a school to an undergraduate. Not X amount of paper citations, not X amount of PhDs awarded per professor as used in "international" rankings. UMich will never even be as good as NYU, which itself tails USC (again, as an overall institution, non-specific to NYC finance recruiting), so chill out with the state school angst.

In the end, we're comparing a school with a 32% acceptance rate with another one of similar size with a 16% acceptance rate. The median quality of students who attend either school are on completely different levels, academically.

Of course USC is non-represented in NYC banking, it's a west coast school with broader industry focus. Do you see any UCLA, Berkeley, UCSD, Claremont, Caltech grads in NYC? No, but that would negate your cute narrative. Kids who go to school in California can actually get jobs outside of finance - in OP's case, if he decides against finance he has opportunities in tech, accounting, media, real estate and so forth.

If he goes to UMich and doesn't get accepted to Ross, he's stuck outside of Detroit for 4 years with no likely employment outcome, which is the single most useless "international" experience he could get by coming to the US. At that point, he may as well go back to his home country.

 

The #1 biggest factor in the USNWR rankings is a cloudy "academic reputation" score that allows the magazine to manipulate the rankings however they want to make the rankings change every year to keep selling those magazines. USC is simply not as respected nationwide academically as the elite publics, which you'll see in legitimate rankings like the QS World Rankings or the Academic Ranking of World Universities. Even LSA at Michigan is better than USC, and obviously Ross is worlds better than anything you could get there. Michigan students primarily get jobs in New York, Chicago, and San Francisco, not Detroit. None of the friends I graduated with moved to Detroit, and I have an extensive network in New York that would easily transfer to any major city in the country. Also, this site is focused on NYC banking, and you're not going to get a good job in NYC banking out of USC, period. You have a great shot at it out of Ross. I guess if the goal is, like you said, a "sleeper presence in MM or Boutique finance", then USC is fine. Some people just like to strive for more.

Also, just in the effort of getting facts correct, Michigan had a 26% acceptance rate this year (source: http://admissions.umich.edu/apply/freshmen-applicants/student-profile) and USC had an 18% acceptance rate (source: http://www.usc.edu/admission/undergraduate/firstyear/prospective/profil…). However, you can pretty safely assume that Michigan's out of state acceptance rate is in the low teens given the strong majority of applications come from out of state and the incoming class is artificially balanced to be around 50% in state. Michigan is also a much larger undergraduate school than USC (28k vs. 18k), so it has more spots to fill, yet Michigan's incoming class test scores were actually higher than USC. The ACT composite range was 30-33 at USC and 30-34 at Michigan, and the composite SAT range was 1980-2200 at USC and 2040-2280 at Michigan. This is quite telling about the actual quality of students there considering the size difference of the schools means Michigan has to have a lot of really high end kids to bring up the extra at the bottom they have to enroll. Those high end kids are the ones you'll be spending time with at Ross every day.

I believe it's your bias that's getting in the way here, not mine.

 
Best Response

I'm not going to aggressively dispute anything here, because I would agree that historically, Michigan (Ross) has been light years ahead of USC, and you obviously feel very proud of your education. Having said that, I think you're taking a bit of a drastic approach to your reasoning, and the belief that Ross is "worlds better" just simply isn't true. When it comes to the West Coast, and especially LA (but even SF also), USC's brand carries a very very strong name. I know for certain that SC places a huge portion of Marshall students into banking each year - I studied with them and have stayed in touch for the past two years during my banking stint...and it has only grown.

What I would say, is that if given the choice (and if I'm not drinking my own kool-aide), I would be hard pressed to choose USC over UMich Ross. Pound for pound, placing into banking and PE, it is likely the stronger platform. But I wouldn't rule out USC as hard as you apparently do, and know from caliber of student, the differences are laughably minor. Another thing to consider, is the total numbers of folks that are actually trying to go into banking from USC/Marshall is a minuscule percentage when compared to the total number trying to break in from Ross. If you really are so adamant about your username and alma mater, I can give you the piece of mind that if anything, Ross is probably a step up in terms of finance opportunities....you win. However, a few of your statements are just absurd, if not a bit juvenile.

When it comes to UVa, I think the waters are a bit murkier. If I was to choose, it would probably come down to intangibles like location, southern vibes vs. west coast, wanting NYC or SF post-grad, etc.

At the end of the day, all these undergrad business platforms are phenomenal in their own respect, filled with kids who (mostly) worked their asses of to get there, and if they try to break into the world of finance, have a damn good shot at it.

"Some people like to strive for more"....C'mon dude. Get back to running leverage reads on CapIQ and tossing in buzzwords into powerpoint slides no one is even going to look at. Fucking IB - glad I'm out.

 

I'm sorry, this is just patently false and it's obvious you have no idea what you're talking about. Michigan and UVa are clearly a cut above USC for banking placement.

For reference, in my BB analyst class (including SF/NYC/LA), there are 0 USC grads, while there are 5 from Michigan and 3 from UVa. I'll be joining a megafund this summer and in my associate class, there is one person from Michigan, none from USC.

Within my network, I know several Michigan and UVa kids at other BBs. I only know one person from USC, and he was an MBA student.

USC and NYU are not peer schools with Michigan/UVa. That said, NYU Stern places phenomenally and likely does better than Michigan and UVa in terms of NYC placement.

If you want to end up in NYC, the choice is clear.

And to answer your idiotic "rhetorical" question about there not being UCLA/Claremont kids in NYC - yes, actually there are several out here, in addition to a bunch of Stanford grads. And for what it's worth, I'm pretty sure Ann Arbor was voted the number 1 college town in America, so it's not "stuck outside Detroit".

I grew up in Southern California, and from my high school, the only kids who went to USC were those who got rejected from Berkeley and UCLA.

If you don't know what you're talking about, and are just going to spout off bullshit about USNWR without any actual idea about placement, then you should get off this forum.

 

Objectively I'd say UVA and UMich are about on par and USC is a bit lower. I have no connection to any of these places so I'm just telling you how they are perceived. But as you mentioned LA would be a great time for 4 years.

 

Not OP, but some interesting inputs in this thread so I'll just post a question of my own. (Stuck in a very similar situation). How well does USC place (ER, IB, S&T) in LA/SF/Palo Alta/Menlo Park? Not saying that I want to go into these roles but they give a good indication of the quality of OCR. I've heard varied responses so was hoping to hear from some experienced monkeys who work/have worked in the west coast.

 

Relative to East Coast schools, not fantastic because the West Coast offices are all pretty small in terms of headcount. Your raw likelihood of breaking into the investment banking field will be lower regardless of which school you choose to attend in California. Additionally, you'll be competing with Wharton and Harvard kids who would prefer to work on the sunshine coast over NYC and kids out of those schools naturally get first pick.

Relative to West Coast schools... well IMO there are only two brackets of schools on the west coast. USC, Berkeley, UCLA, Claremont are in the same bracket. There's not enough differentiation among them to observe separation onto different tiers and any claims that Berkeley has some edge over the others is placebo (and self-affirmation for suffering through the most regrettable college experience out of the 4). The numbers reflect this truth. Stanford and Caltech are in the "don't give a shit about banking" bracket... because kids from these schools consciously avoid the finance industry like a plague for certain established reasons.

Since you asked about USC, one advantage that they have is their sleeper presence in MM and Boutique finance. There are shops all over Orange County, LA, and San Diego that are founded/run by USC alumni and exclusively hire USC grads. I would have appreciated having that in my undergrad. Alumni favoritism is taken to the next level at USC if for no other reason than because USC is the largest/most prestigious (and one of the few to begin with) private school alumni networks on the West Coast. If you ever roll off of investment banking into say Commercial RE or Corp Fin, it's basically all USC people at that point also.

 

Also, USC's admissions rate and 'selectivity' metric are a joke. It's grossly inflated by the fact that fully 1/3 of their incoming freshman class is deferred admission until the second semester of the year so that they don't have to be included in the 'regular' admissions statistics/pool, and their lower statistics don't bring down the median scores. You don't see that at public schools like Michigan or UVa because they don't need to compensate for anything...

 

I wasn't going to jump into this conversation, myself being pretty content watching the high-school level of "whose college is better" drama unfold, but some of the misinformation being spread on here is atrocious. And it's pretty funny that one of these posters is throwing bananas at everything that pampers their apparently fragile ego and throwing monkey shit and things they don't wanna see. Must be a progressive.

First, let me start off by saying: "Elite publics" is an absolute oxymoron, with the only exception being UC Berkeley, and this is coming from someone who went to a state school. There is zero prestige associated with UCLA, UMich, UVA, UNC etc. Anyone can get into those schools, seriously. They're just places where, if you have the SAT score and GPA, you go to get an education for cheap. The fact that more kids have been applying, thus bringing down acceptance rates, doesn't chance the purpose for which these institutions were designed for. They're also blatant in their practice of affirmative action and favoritism for OOS tuition.

Seriously, if you're going to start pulling out numbers, PLEASE don't think you can sneak cherry picked and falsified figures past the demographic of this site... UMich's OOS acceptance rate isn't in the low teens... it's almost 30% according to this: http://obp.umich.edu/wp-content/uploads/almanac/Almanac_Ch2_Jan2015.pdf. That's given by UMich's low-20%s OOS yield rate - so apparently it's not entirely a popular choice with Gordon Gekko juniors. You cited no source for that claim of "low teens", but I have a feeling you had actually convinced yourself of your own made up fact.

You used average stats of enrolled students for USC and compared it to average stats of admitted students for UMich. Very embarrassing error if unintentional, very lame if intentional. If you were to put the two side by side, USC would be marginally more demanding of students, though maybe not on completely different levels as the other person states. Also, USC's acceptance rate was indeed in the 16%s according this: https://news.usc.edu/96445/usc-invites-8920-intelligent-diverse-newcome…. But at this point, we're splitting percentage points which is silly. And then you started talking about end point variance with respect to UMich having more "high end kids" because it's 9,000 students larger. I have no idea what point you were trying to establish with saying this, and also what the hell a "high end kid" is to you. AFAIK USC is one of the only private universities in the nation to offer full academic rides, so if we had to draw a conclusion from that, I think it would be that USC has more "high end kids"? Sorry, but I really had a laugh at this one.

I'd be worried with you working in DCM with your numerical ineptitude, though maybe Equity Research would be a better fit with your bullshitting skills.

To address the other poster, here is the matriculation data for one of the top prep schools in California, which I found in in a second of googling: http://www.hw.com/about/School-Profile/Matriculation. A small sample size for sure, but four times as many kids ended up enrolling at USC over UCLA and Berkeley. Funnily enough, UMich did get more kids than both UCLA and Cal, and nearly half as many as USC out of a Californian High School. Maybe you went to a much lower level High School where kids couldn't afford private universities, but the ones who have the choice of going to USC apparently do go.

Don't talk about admissions manipulation unless you have evidence to back it up. Public schools, including UMich are comprised of nearly 50% transfer students in the upper divisions. That means a significant proportion degrees conferred by these schools are to students who started off in community college and took the backdoor in. This is why "elite publics" are an oxymoron. Don't tell me UMich doesn't also have a waitlist or Early Action - which itself is direct and blatant gaming of the yield rate, which directly correlates to the acceptance rate. USC apparently has no waitlist or EA - which they could utilize without judgement like UMich if they truly wanted to milk their acceptance rates. Looks like you guys were compensating for something after all. Trying to attract that 80% of OOS admittees that go elsewhere?

Apparently, like the poster above, you're apparently not very good with numbers either. Does Ross not have many math prerequisites or something? You take a sample space of your extensive 10 person network and extrapolate that to mean something statistically significant. Somehow with your 10 person network, you're cognizant of your bank's entire placement inclusive of the NYC, LA, SF offices. When it comes down to it, no-one said USC is good for finance placement relative to UMich Ross. The fact that UMich is in Michigan and USC is in California is case in point. It is an established fact, however, that UMich is not as good of an overall school as USC or NYU, or UCLA, Cal and UVA for that matter. After doing the research, I figured that there's just too much compensation going on.

 

I'll ignore the plethora of ad hominem attacks because they add nothing to your argument and it's frankly laughable that half of your "argument" involves trying to disparage someone you've never met on the internet. I will admit upfront that I was just quickly scanning for the test scores when I was comparing USC and Michigan and didn't realize I was comparing slightly different figures. USC's low end ACT for admits is 1 point above Michigan and the SAT's are comparable.

Your first paragraph is conjecture and patently false. No real need to go further into it, anyone familiar with the front office banking hiring process would disagree with you. There are publics besides Berkeley that are full on targets (Michigan/UVA).

For someone so quick to deride my ability to interpret data, however, you made some mistakes of your own. That lengthy Michigan report you linked to only lists through the 2014 high school class, and my data is from the 2016 class. It's numbers are incorrect as the admissions rate overall is much lower for 2016 than it was in 2014. You also characterized the OOS yield listed in there as "low 20%" when it's clearly listed in 2014 as 27%. That's rich coming from someone who derides bullshitting every other sentence. I would make a joke about your claiming to be a "quant" and not being able to see this stuff, but I'll pass.

Data from one prep school is also complete bs cherry picking. I'm not familiar with top California prep schools, but I'd imagine that a private school in California would be able to better recruit kids from a private school in California to attend. That means literally nothing as far as how the two schools are perceived nationally. And way to take the high road, no I'm not poor, but I see you couldn't resist trying to throw that in there.

And for someone so quick to deny stats that didn't have a source, you were quite liberal with the claim that upper division classes at Michigan are 50% transfer students. That's not even close to true. Michigan retains 97% of freshman and graduates 80% in 4 years, 90% in 6 years. The graduating class sizes are about the same size as the incoming freshman classes, so your math simply does not check out there.

It's also pretty well documented that USC delays a number of freshman to Spring to manipulate their admit stats. I don't know how many, but here's an article on it: http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2014-07-12/news/bs-md-spring-admission…

Anyways, congrats on going on an ad hominem filled rant that, ironically, proved you to be bad at the very things you were calling me bad at.

 

Forgive the attacks if you're offended by them, it's just trash talk. Even though I didn't go to USC, when people with big heads (i.e. bankers) talk about the schools they went to, it always gets heated, so try to take it with some humor. You'll walk away from this no worse off for health, I promise.

Obviously, I'm aware of the actual numbers, but they don't dress up the narrative quite as well. I was just inspired by your ability to spin the figures and I was trying to keep up. I couldn't find a 2015-2016 version of the same report - and what difference is there from year to year anyway? You got into UMich way before its acceptance rate went below 32%, so it hasn't really benefited you. Like I said though, at this point, we're splitting percentage points in admission rates which is pointless.

You really have to let go of the notion that this discussion was ever about USC being less or more of a target than UMich. Of course USC isn't a finance target school - at no point in this thread has anyone claimed that. Neither could Berkeley possibly keep up with "lesser" public schools in UMich and UVA, probably UNC as well. Kids in California just aren't interested in investment banking, and banks aren't that interested in travelling over there to inspire them. It's a mutually disassociative relationship. When someone said they met a bunch of Stanford grads in NYC, I was genuinely surprised (or suspicious they were BSing), because no-one graduating Stanford undergrad went to Stanford as a path into finance. There are many other glamorized fields of work on this side of the country with far cleaner of a reputation in this blue state. At some point halfway down this thread, it became about inspiring the OP to think beyond the narrow scope of attending a US school as an international student with the sole desire to enter NYC investment banking. For that purpose, I figured USC is a better school in terms of environment and academics. If you were a high school aged student who didn't know about investment banking, you would agree. You should be content with the edge you do have at UMich and concede that other schools are better for other purposes - perhaps purposes which are more pertinent to the situation of the person who made this thread. That was the point I made in my first post on this thread.

You said that the matriculation profile I linked was cherry picked, and I agree and had even put a disclaimer. Tiny sample size. Hard to find such data freely available on the internet, so private prep schools that use this data as free advertising are the only accessible sources. I'd still say they're good ones because kids and parents who send their kids to prep schools of this caliber usually know what they're doing when it comes to choosing colleges. Here's another one: http://www.exeter.edu/documents/college_matriculation.pdf. This data is probably closer to what you're looking for. A top East Coast located school that sends roughly equal proportion of kids to UMich, and USC relative to admission class size, if not favoring USC a little bit. I certainly wasn't calling you poor. But the person saying the kids in their school went to UCLA and Berkeley over USC certainly did not attend a high school like Harvard Westlake, Stuyvesant, or Exeter.

You make Spring Admission such an enormous deal, but in the article? you linked, USC was mentioned at one point in the entire thing, only tangentially in relation to countless other schools in the nation that also practice Spring Admission. UC Berkeley, for example, also has a Spring class in addition to a wait list. Spring admission really isn't what you should be focusing on. There are logistical reasons for implementing it, mainly staggering students through the entry level classes so professors for 101 classes aren't left with enormously packed lectures in the fall and no-one to teach in the spring. For a school like Berkeley, which has 2000 students enrolled in its first CS class, this is a very reasonable logistical solution. For USC, they have a certain reputation to uphold as a private university for keeping class sizes small. On the other hand, there's much less validity for having EA and waitlist programs, other than to maximize the school's yield rate (thus, being able to accept a smaller class) and to dampen the freedom of kids applying to college.

By the way, have you figured out a way to give yourself a Silver Banana or something? Or do you have a little monkey that follows you around, throwing bananas at everything you post the second you hit "Add Comment"? Let me know where you got yours, I might pick one up for myself. It's kind of funny. Some people take this site a little too seriously.

 

I am new to this website, but all this banter is so hilarious. Honestly, it is all about perspective. OP I am an international student, and where I come from the perceived prestige of the above mentioned schools vary greatly. I am an Industrial Engineering student at Michigan, so my opinion might obviously be biased, so take it with a pinch of salt. Honestly, far too many people are slaves of the USNWR rankings and often schools fudge their data to reduce their acceptance rate. You should know that acceptance rate is nothing to do with school quality. UChicago had an acceptance rate of 45% in 2005 yet it was ranked in the top 10 and had equally qualified students. Are you telling me that it was a worse off school then? Nope, it was just not on the Common Application and had many self-selecting students who liked that sort of a cutthroat culture. Similarly, Michigan has to have a large class size cause it is after all committed to serving the population of Michigan. Their OOS Acceptance Rate for the latest class is about 18%. Michigan too was not on the Common App until 2010, when it had an extraordinarily high acceptance rate. Now, it has plummeted down to the 25% range and will keep falling.

Business - Ross>Marshall, there are about 0 rankings which disprove this. Engineering - COE>Viterbi, see above point. Law - UM>USC, no debate UM is a T-14 law schoo Medicine - UM>USC, one of the best medical school systems in the nation.

WestCoastQuant can rant on and on, but truth of the matter is if you take any other ranking System, here are the hard facts: ARWU Ranking - UM is 22 and USC is 49 QS World Rankings - UM is 30, USC is 130 (lol) THE Times Rankings - UM is 21, USC is 68 THE Times REPUTATION Rankings - UM is 19, USC is 61-70 (lol)

Full Disclosure: I was admitted to Umich (1 of 3 students) as well as USC (1 of 11 students). Michigan is viewed far more reputable than USC, which is considered a safety. All students willing to pay full sticker price are auto-admitted to USC from my high school. Within the US the difference might be less obvious, but internationally there is no comparison.

 

Lol a Fob using rankings to measure universities. Is anyone surprised?

Guess what schools are ranked the following:

ARWU 201-300 (lol) QS 224 (lol) Times 108 (lol)

How about this:

ARWU 201-300 (lol) QS 158 (lol) Times 104 (lol)

Or this:

ARWU 301–400 (lol) QS 213 (lol) Times 94 (lol)

This?

Washington Monthly 113 ARWU 75 QS 49 Times 51

Did you get Notre Dame, Dartmouth, Georgetown, and Brown? No, you didn't because you're an idiot who thinks people in banking, much less anyone else, gives a shit about joke research rankings that are only put out to prevent public school students from committing suicide over their incessant inferiority complexes.

I like how you masturbated over Michigan's 32.2% acceptance rate but conveniently left out the other school's. Any of the schools I listed, you would never get into in a million years. I'm sorry your parents were disappointed that you only got into Michigan though I'm sure they're happier after you made them look up its rankings. They're proud of you, I'm sure.

You should probably go back to lurking because no-one on this site will take you seriously after your first post is about college rankings, law school and med school rankings much less. I also heard rankings are a great talking point during investment banking interviews, good luck getting your H-1B!

 

You little twit why would I apply to such schools considering I wanted to study Engineering. One man's trash is another man's treasure, so by you calling the other rankings useless doesn not make it so. The earlier poster(s) was using shitty measures such as acceptance rates and making unsubstantiated claims such as 'Its well established that schools like UCLA, NYU, USC etc' are better than Michigan and my reply was to him. Keep being a keyboard warrior, this community is filled with psuedo-intellects anyway. I got into a host of schools (USC, NYU, Tufts, Michigan, GAtech, Berkeley etc) and sticking to the original arguement you can spew whatever you want, but Michigan's national and international reputation far exceeds that of USC. Each ranking has its flaws, but you cannot choose one among many to prove your point. I am done with this silly talk, each and every school mentioned here is in its own way elite and in no way gonna stop anyone from achieving their goals if they have the drive and desire. Good day to you sir.

 

And I don't know under which rock you are living, but public schools like Berkeley/Michigan/UVA have hundreds of students who choose them over peer instituitions like Georgetown/Notre Dame/Brown etc. Not everyone is a prestige whore like you, there are people who also see fit and the prospect of 4 happy years. And the schools you mentioned are at best a tiniest notch above these publics, please stop fooling yourself. If you think I am suffering from inferiority complex then what are you? I never bashed anyone in the first place. I am sure you went to a prestigious private that was a near ivy/lower ivy that was not quite in the same ball park as the top 10 schools. After a certain point, what school you goes to does not give you a edge/hold you back. If you are a real banker, why are you wasting time arguing with a fired up college student like me? Do you have nothing else to do?

 

It looks like you're well-aware of what you're getting yourself into, but a little bit of side advice:

You might want to consider majoring in STEM alongside your primary major if you're able, or just major in STEM instead. Why? You get an extra 24 months of OPT (optional practical training) time, which is huge for international students in the current job environment.

Consider this: On the day the H1-B applications opened last year, 3 times as many applications were sent in as there are H1-B Visas up for grabs annually.

There's a cap-gap to make sure you can continue working until your H1-B is approved (if it's approved anyway - the odds don't look good), but based on what I heard, many employers would prefer if you were guaranteed to have at least 2 years' worth of work authorization, all things being equal, when considering you for an offer (consult a lawyer when in doubt - I don't have a JD).

 
djehutyvector:
It looks like you're well-aware of what you're getting yourself into, but a little bit of side advice:

You might want to consider majoring in STEM alongside your primary major if you're able, or just major in STEM instead. Why? You get an extra 24 months of OPT (optional practical training) time, which is huge for international students in the current job environment.

Consider this: On the day the H1-B Visa applications opened last year, 3 times as many applications were sent in as there are H1-B Visas up for grabs annually. You'd also want at least 2 summers' worth of internship experience, so you'd have used up about 6 months of OTP before you graduate, leaving you with 6 more months.

There's a cap-gap to make sure you can continue working until your H1-B is approved (if it's approved anyway - the odds don't look good), but based on what I heard, many employers would prefer if you were guaranteed to have at least 2 years' worth of work authorization, all things being equal, when considering you for an offer (consult a lawyer when in doubt - I don't have a JD).

Not sure if you are correctly informed but summer internships don't use up OPT. For your summer internships, you use CPT time and CPT doesn't effect your one year duration of OPT after graduation UNLESS you spend 12 months of CPT.

If you have had two summer internships, that is at the most 6 months under the condition that every one of your two internships were three months long. Please don't spread false information. I have had people tell me that doing summer internships will shorten my OPT.

But you make a good point about STEM majors having the advantage of that extra 24 months of OPT.

 

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