Help out a naive young one to make the right choices(UK)
I'm at a crossroads, I was so fixated on getting into a target university (UK) that I applied to something that I semi-liked just so I could get into UCL. I applied for history politics and economics (knowing it had a higher acceptance rate) in the hopes of switching to economics and business which I'd enjoy a lot more and is more useful. I'm at UCL now and that course I wanted to switch to is more than full so 0 hopes to transfer into it and no other targets accept transfers unless it's extreme cases.
So I'm grudgingly staying in my current course HPE, however, I have a constant fear that the target university is not as important as I think it is for IB in the coming future. This combined with all the new unpredictable AI changes, having an HPE degree will not be as useful as it is not nearly as quantitative as I'd like it to be, just an insane amount of reading that I'm not enjoying. So this degree is not really useful, comparatively speaking, in the job market.
If for whatever reason I didn't manage to get a graduate role straight out of UCL, and when I try to break into IB afterwards, then the target university and my degree wont really put me at much as an advantage as it would have when applying to internships, if at all. So I ended up doing a degree I dint really like just so I could get an IB internship which I didn't get (I have been applying since the 2nd week of October).
What should I do, have I been too naive.
1. Target universities matter a fuckton.
2. You're spiralling about a whole bunch of nothing - like what does you not doing Econ and biz have to do with AI. Not really sure what you're getting at. Econ and biz isn't really sufficiently quantitative to do any job that would be described at "quantitative" anyway. In addition, if you're referring to being able to code or whatever - you're still able to do that outside of school (and again Econ and biz would not have helped). If you think IB is completely done for (it probably isn't) then well, there are probably bigger problems at hand for the wider job market.
3. If you truly can't stand your course then it's going to be tough to finish with a decent grade. First year is a cake walk compared to the latter 2 years. Consider this before making next steps. I'd say quitting to reapply isn't the end of the world in favour of a course you actually like.
On point number 1 - do they though?
Recently it seems more and more obvious they're moving away from target unis and are hiring based on other metrics. I can only speak for myself but the uni I go to has definitely seen a dilution in successful applicants over the years, and my uni is a target.
While it is obvious that attending a target uni is beneficial to the firm as it reassures clients that the personnel at the firm are able to meet the client's immediate needs, I've seen hiring from semi and non-targets grow a lot more.
Imo, yes. While you see more diversification in uni representations, some firms still care a lot about the school name, and everything Warwick and below is rare. You see that more in the most prestigious banks, and especially for any buy side recruitment.
Econ and business is quite quantitative in UCL, the majority of the modules are maths or stats-related which I have a better time learning. So from what I know when applying to jobs or other degree programs they also look at what kind of modules u took rather than just the name of the course.
Mate, grind out university and do finance society extracurriculars. If you think doing HPE puts you at a disadvantage compared to Econ for recruiting you are delusional. I do UCL Econ myself and can confirm it makes 0 difference doing HPE as opposed to Econ for IB recruiting. Polish your CV through societies and projects - your issue with recruiting is your CV, not your degree.
Nobody cares about quantitative skills in IB, I literally know History and Geography students who got in. The math is not difficult. Nobody cares if you can do complex matrix algebra or can prove some obscure lemma.
This job really isn't as intellectually demanding as people think. I wonder where the myth of being a numbers person even came from for banking?
wants to get into banking —-> applies 2nd week of october. what?
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