Top target schools for quant hedge fund or quant/algo prop shop?

Question

I'm a high school senior this year and am deciding where to apply early.  Was wondering what the general consensus was on what the top tier of undergraduate schools are for quant hedge funds and algo prop shops.  MIT, Harvard, and Princeton are up there, right?  Is UChicago good for prop shops in its backyard?  What about Duke and Yale?

About me: I have Penn legacy but don't really want to go there.  Am looking to get a degree in math, stats, or financial engineering probably.  Don't like frats but not a fan of activist lefties or weird kids either.

whitewalker · Accepted Answer

I work at a top quant hedge fund (one of D.E. Shaw, Citadel, Two Sigma). We recruit primarily at Harvard and MIT where most of our researchers come from, and all other top schools are considered roughly equally (Princeton, Stanford, Yale, Caltech, Chicago, Columbia etc.). The other places I interviewed at I got roughly the same vibe, with the exception of AQR (who focused on Penn and Chicago). The prop shops are also more of a mix. For whatever reason Stanford has historically not produced many quants, but we're seeing an increasing number of good people from there.

princepieman · Answer

Same target schools as the ones top tech companies target..

e.g. MIT, CMU, Berkeley, Columbia, Harvard, UMich, Princeton, Caltech etc

TopBoy.- · Answer

top US schools blow LSE out of the water. Can't recruit for the US if you go to a UK school and LSE doesn't produce that many quants anyway compared to Oxbridge, Imperial and even Warwick.

monkey_wso_2019 · Answer

Not sure if this is fair academically speaking, though maybe true reputation wise.. I did my undergraduate at Oxbridge and postgraduate at UCL and was not that impressed with the calibre of quite a few of the US top school undergrads that came over. I believe getting into university is largely based on extracurricular activities over there as opposed to pure academic rigour like it is in the UK - anecdotally, a guy I know from school managed to get a place at Harvard with awful A levels because he was good at singing, and the guys who went to top US schools weren't the top of our cohort.

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Top target schools for quant hedge fund or quant/algo prop shop?

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