About a week ago, I was sitting at my desk at my current PE internship when the partners and the CEO were filling in a questionnaire that an investor (bank) had requested. The specific question that caught my attention was one that asked for the caliber of my firm's current and previous interns.
The answer provided by the big guys?
We have had Ivy League interns, mostly from Harvard, Stanford, Yale and other top universities such as Oxford, Cambridge and LSE.
There was no mention of my non-target university. I could tell that they felt bad seeing as this was all done 10 feet away from me and I could hear everything, so what followed was an attempt to make me feel better about myself:
...and other universities.
Safe to say this made me feel somewhat insecure despite the great work I have done for the firm so far, but it also made me think. When does this "curse" end? WSO seems to discuss the problem up to the point of breaking into finance/Wall Street, but how much does the non-target name hold one back at later stages of ones career? Does the university name mean less at more senior levels? Most boutique IB/PE firms appear to be run/owned by Harvard or Wharton grads. Does the name of their undergrad or business school give them more credibility for e.g. fundraising, getting the first clients? Or are they inherently smarter and more capable?
I'd like to hear your views on this.
To give you another example: I was meeting with an entrepreneur who was seeking an non-controlling equity investment from us, and he had done an MBA at my business school as well as an MBA at Harvard. In the meeting I tried breaking the ice by saying: "I saw you went to X university, I went there too...". Seeing as he was looking for investment, he was quick to dismiss what I just said by almost shouting out "Yes, but I also got an MBA from Harvard".
When fundraising or starting ones own business, particularly in Finance, will non-target alumni have a tougher time than target alumni due to credibility discrepancies?
Personally, I know I am as capable if not more so than many top school students/graduates. But is it then the case that non-targets will always have to work five times harder than them forever? I understand this is true and somewhat fair at entry level, of course, but I wonder whether it prevails; will the target always win on average?
Why do all non-targets on this site think they work so much harder than targets? People don't just walk into top schools out of high school, they bust their asses to get there. And that's just the beginning, you have to kick ass in undergrad to stand out among a huge pool people who are all top students and who all want the same thing you do. I see tons of kids on facebook all the time chirping about how they made deans list or got a 4.0 at even decent state schools despite them being the ones chucking spitballs at the teacher during class. Targets are a whole different ballgame when classes are curved in a pool of way more talented students.
And again just going to a target doesn't mean you're entitled to an awesome job after graduation. You need to be a TOP student at a TOP undergrad, hence why banks only go to a certain number of schools since they can fill their classes many times over with these kids and still leave the vast majority without anything.
Wondering the same thing. The ol' chip-on-the-shoulder routine gets pretty nauseating after a while.[/quote]
I go to a non target and mostly agree that complaining by non targets sucks in general. However, lets be honest and say that hs/college is easy as hell and that usually its the kids who are the hardest workers that get into banking/pe (not smartest or most talented IMO, they go to the quant hedge funds, grad school in physics, etc). I know people that spent their entire livelihoods studying a ton, sacrificed any semblance of a social life in order to get to HYPS ultimately to get that wall street job. However, I also know people who work as hard in college as those kids did in hs sacrificing a ton, and there are kids at targets slacking with a 3.3 in government getting BB offers left and right. Why should High school performance count more than college performance when privileged kids get a massive leg up from having involved, well informed parents while college is a great equalizer (at state schools) where everyone is on their own to succeed without any outside help?
Of course firms should account for being at a better school, having a better GPA, etc but for the purposes of fairness they should at least weight hs performance 50% of the equation with college being the other 50% rather than skewing the importance of hs to be 90% and the importance of college as 10%, especially stopping this crap taking non business/econ/stem majors (anth, sociology, political science, etc) at targets who add only the school's brand name and tend to burn/crash with IB hours.
This is a joke. Non-target students have to work way harder. Target students don't have to stand out - they have a resume drop, the end. IMO if you're from Penn and you didn't make it to GS/MS/JPM or a MF PE analyst position, you're probably an idiot who didnt utilize his or her resources, and a nontarget student who busted his ass just to get DB IBD can probably crush you.
Cheers to the nontargets.
non-target = too many life mistakes
Let's be serious, there are myriad of people here from non-targets constantly whining about getting a job in the finance industry. Even worse they are always whing about working in high finance (IB, ER, PE, HF) front office roles. My favorite questions are "What are my chances, resume included [crap credentials]?"
Seriously, very few people to nobody looks past your school on your resume.
Most of them will NEVER work in these roles at any point in their life and would be lucky to get into the industry now.
For most people their career potential is ultimately decided by the end of their junior year of high school.
Your a moron, there are lots of people who did bad in hs, go to total non targets and through a reassessment of priorities get into M7 business schools and work at MBB and BB IBD afterwards. This is fucking AMERICA, not France, people can be successful whenever they want to - whenever they decide to put in the effort and go after their calling.
On the actual subject, bankers care alot about this stuff, but that's probably because they are borderline retarded. I find people who lack intellectual capabilities rely much more heavily on school creds. I wouldn't really worry too much about what bankers think, alot of ppl running money and making srs money think bankers are losers fwiw.
The problem with non-target is that it implies that your not brilliant and were lazy earlier in life. High school is a complete joke if you are the smartest guy in the room you can ace it even if you smoke pot all day and don't give a fuck. And if you are not the smartest guy in the room then you have to do banking, and for that you need to be a work horse, and school is a proxy for how much of a work horse you are...
regardless of how things play out, key is to not have a chip on your shoulder. The whole I went to a non-target, don't come from a priviliged background etc... thing gets old quickly, nobody gives a fuck and you will just piss people off.
It matters a lot for PE and banking. It doesn't matter much for most hedge funds (at least not those in the business of making money). There are plenty of state school grads running money and putting up big numbers, and plenty of state school grads at the analyst level.
The best performing long short hedge fund in the country over the last 15 years is run by someone who went to a school most people couldn't locate on a map, and the firm employs no target school people at all.
The best performing (or one of them) long short hedge funds over the last 3 years (launched 2009) is run by a 30 year old guy from Berkeley. The one analyst working for him went to UCLA.
Nobody cares where you went to school if you can make money. A lot of Ivy grads wash out and don't ever make it in the business.
WSO has a lot of the Steve Jobs reality distortion field going on. Feel free to ignore any and all of the prestige posts here.