Where VS What VS How well you study. What matters more?
In another thread a user stated that, for a job, he would rather take someone with no internships who studied Politics at Harvard than someone with internships who studied Business or Finance at XY university.
Really? Is the (banking and finance) world really like that? The WHERE matters more than the WHAT and the HOW WELL? The school name matters more than the relevance of your degree, your grades or your work experience?
I can certainly understand that someone with a Harvard 4.0 MBA wins over anyone else in competition. But what if the Harvard MBA guy has a, say, 3.2 GPA and the guy with an MBA from XY university has a 4.0 GPA, would the Harvard guy still make the game? Really?
Or a Harvard history or politics graduate would be preferred to a business, finance or econ. graduate from XY university? Really?
I’m still in school, so my opinion might not be too strong. But to be fair the guy who got into harvard probably worked a lot harder to get into harvard than the guy who went to a no name school, and that already says a lot about someone’s work ethic. If I had an option to choose between a mediocre harvard guy vs a 3.8-4.0 kid at a no name school, I would choose the harvard guy if everything else is the same. It’s just how it works. I’ve been told by recruiters that they also have strong preferences for top school candidates (no surprise here). But a trader at GS who now is a MD and in charge of recruiting once told me at a event only for my school (10-15 kids) that the fact that we made it to a school like this shows how hard working and to an extent smart we were in high school and it’s also an indication for how hard we’re willing to work in the future. That along with the fact that he has worked with and would like to work with people from the same school would make him choose a guy from a top school over a guy from a random school. That’s just what he told me
True but with decreasing acceptance rates-for its recent class, Harvard had an acceptance rate of 4.5 percent-top colleges are getting increasingly harder to get into leaving many very qualified applicants going to lower ranked schools.
Yeah but if a top candidate just barely not makes it to harvard, he would still be strong enough to get into a target/top school. I know really strong candidates who were strong enough to get into any top schools - they were rejected from a lot but they managed to get one in the end.
In the case that they don’t get in, they would be one of the many hard working kids from non-targets who get into top funds/banks because of their work ethic and their ability to take advantage of opportunities
The only way to "guarantee" acceptance to a top college is by shotgunning it and applying to 15-20 schools. However by doing this a candidate puts less time on each individual essay, reducing his/her chances of getting into a top school. In years time a school like Georgetown, ranked around the 20 mark, will most likely see its acceptance rate decrease by half as will the other t20s. Getting into a top college is getting ridiculously competitive.
The thing is that so much of recruiting happens on-campus, so if you're at a non-target where recruiters don't go then you have to rely on online applications (which seldom get read) and cold-networking (which not many people even think to do).
I went to UVA, which some argue isn't even in the top echelon of target schools, but still I knew people that were Biology or Public Policy majors who ended up in finance and consulting. I also knew quite a few people with barely over 3.0 GPAs who ended up with fantastic jobs. On the other hand I know a lot of kids that went to JMU, George Mason or Towson, majored in finance and pulled phenomenal grades yet could only break into Big 4 Audit or FP&A for small cybersecurity companies in NoVA, just because the major banks and consulting firms don't tend to recruit at those schools.
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