how to cope with regret?
I walked into university thinking I made the right call—choosing a more rigorous major (CS & AI at Edinburgh) over an easier one (Information Business at UCL), assuming recruiters would value difficulty and higher entry requirements. With a 43/45 in IB and offers from UCL, LSE, and Edinburgh, I thought picking the course with the highest entry bar was the smart move. (38 for UCL, and LSE, 42 for Edin). Turns out, I was dead wrong.
Prestige matters a lot. Recruiters in banking barely care about major difficulty; they care about school name and location. UCL and LSE grads have proximity to top firms, and networking events. Edinburgh? Not the same pull. If I could go back, I'd take the UCL/LSE offers in a heartbeat.
Brother, I apologize but what are you talking about?
You can't live in the past; what's done is done. Plenty of kids from Edinburgh are breaking in. Plenty of kids from UCL and LSE are not breaking in. Don't forget that a recruiter will also look at your degree, and Information Business at UCL would fall well down the pecking order vs. finance/econ, etc., and you'd be compared with the kids at your uni studying those 'more competitive' degrees.
Not to be cynical, but you're making excuses. That's ok, but remember that nothing is a given; breaking into IB is tough, but if you want it badly enough, you will make it. Good luck.
Not the end of the world at all. You made a mistake, for sure - the UCL course is a bit of a joke within the uni but surprisingly places decently well, but I wouldn’t expect someone in high school to be looking into placement on LinkedIn lol.
You have a decent degree title, you can pull off some internships at boutiques. Anyway, as far as I’m aware all banks recruit from Edinburgh so the onus is on you to make yourself stand out. It’s fairly unusual to see a CS->IB move but I have seen it before.
And then you can do a MSc Finance at one of the classic target schools and recruit from there. Don’t deep it and just get good grades and pick up any form of finance work experience.
Yup, IMB used to be one of the fake degrees UCL come up with to scam chinese and it used to have an entry requirement of ABB(lol). But no one cares. LSE management is also joked as a mickey mouse degree but LSE brand just overshadows it. Even media studies/policy studies/anthrophology students end up in banking.
Honestly since your IB scores were so high I believe HR may even look at you like a target student since many target students have grades similar or maybe even worse than you. Also with those grades you could have attended a target if you had reapplied again etc.
No lol. No recruiter cares what your IB score was. Unless maybe you had 44-45, which OP doesn’t
Man you made a post over this??? I fucked up and lost my OG baddie years ago– the one who got away– that's regret. Who's thinking about college prestige so much after college??
The condition does not reflect the entry bar in UK. Some courses in Oxford have AAA as a condition but no sane person would think that those are inferior compared to AstarAstarA courses in WW/Edinburgh
oxbridge and ucl are not same. they require additional tests/interviews to weed out applicants unlike ucl, hence often have lower condition.
I’m not suggesting that UCL is on par with Oxbridge, that is a strawman argument. LSE also offers several courses with AAB entry requirements. Good luck convincing bankers that a degree from Edinburgh with an AstarAstarAstar requirement is inherently superior to the "soft" degrees from LSE.
And for your reference, Edinburgh, Durham and even Warwick end up accepting tons of non-contextual students who eventually failed to meet that minimum requirements. Hence those entry requirements does not fully reflect the difficulty of admission especially for LSE/UCL/KCL since they are regulated to keep the entry requirements low by UoL. That's one of the reasons why imperial left UoL.
There are people who got into Oxford with a BBB in their A levels via foundation year. No one cares about it man.
PPE is AAA at oxford and its one of the most represented courses in the city
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