Thoughts on IU Kelley

Hi all - this topic is discussed fairly often on here and most of what’s said is misguided so I figured I’d give a candid reflection on my experiences thus far. Not going to get into specifics on my background other than I didn’t recruit out of the IBW but am now a member after some orgizational changeups. Hopefully someone may find this post helpful.

In no particular order, my biggest takeaways are below:

1) Success in Kelley / the workshops is more correlation than causation. Bottom line is the workshops don’t get you jobs, but they allow you to leverage an alumni network that helps you along the way. We place huge emphasis on working together in recruiting, but this isn’t limited to just the workshop kids. The perspective here is really IU students vs. everyone else. If you don’t get into the workshops it isn’t a nail in the coffin by any means. If you can place in the workshop you can place outside of it. If you can’t place outside of the workshop you probably wouldn’t have placed well in it.

2) This is speculative, but I’d wager that the top 50 individuals at Kelley are on par with a random selection of 50 from a pool of the top ~100 individuals at [insert better school]. The difference is the bottom 2,450 kids in any given class at Kelley are significantly worse. This is one of the reasons why the workshop exists. It essentially pre-screens for those top 50 which gives banks a sense of security in recruiting.

3) To further the above point, from what I’ve seen the people who got into a top-20 school and choose IU instead typically have great placements… there are some exceptions, but in my opinion being the top candidate at IU might be better than being a good candidate at [insert better school].

4) The non-workshop finance curriculum here is significantly behind other undergrad business schools because it is targeted (for good reason) at the bottom 2,000 kids in the class. My understanding is that from the admin perspective there is no point in having a 400-level class on private equity when only ~15 kids a year out of a 2,500 person class end up in PE jobs out of school. Unfortunantly the result is most of the career-relevant education at Kelley happens outside of your required classes/finance major electives. This may change in the next few years but I wouldn’t get my hopes up.

5) The highlight of our placements are NY EB’s. We aren’t great at NY bulge recruiting (notably bad at GS/MS… JPM varies a lot, BofA/RBC take quite a few each year), but do well at Chi bulges and MM’s. Rx placements have been ~10/year for the past 3 years if you include the 1 or 2 that end up going to A&M/FTI (usually outside of the workshop). PE analyst program recruiting is pretty difficult here. We do fine at places like Shore Cap/Adams Street and non-buyout MF groups like APO FIG/Bx Secondaries, but outside of that opportunities appear limited or inconsistent.

6) I would expect the workshop to get significantly better over the next 10 years. We’ll see how it develops but from what we’ve heard it seems like the new dean is on board with some pretty ambitious initiatives. Excited to see where it all goes.

7) Expect to work hard and cast a wide net if you go here. For better or worse your sophomore year is going to be a mess (workshop recruiting then banking recruiting). There are some exceptions but people usually don’t fall into roles without significant effort. Also, the people who do poorly in recruiting usually do so because they only targeted top firms then didn’t get the offer and had to scramble for a job (ask me how I know).

Curious to see how this post is received on here. Tried to be nuanced where possible because it really isn’t as simple as “X placements per year at X banks but if you don’t get into the workshop you’re up a creek without a paddle”…