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September 30, 2026
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From my personal experience (I just applied to bschool late 2013 and got admitted to Wharton/Columbia; I am a 1st year IBD Industry associate at Citi), it doesn't matter whether you come from an industry group vs. M&A group. They are one and the same. Frankly, I don't think they care about the nuances.
However, they care HUGELY about the name of the firm. The reason why I got dinged from HBS (among other factors) was because I came from Citi. Adcoms want to compose a diversified student body and they will only allocate a certain % of admits from a finance background. With this in mind, they clearly would rather have a kid from McKinsey or Disney learn about finance from a guy that worked at KKR / Bain Capital / Goldman, over someone like me who worked at Citi / BAML / Barclays / DB / CS.
If you have a choice between GS / MS / JPM (all better than the aforementioned tier that I work in), choose GS.
Thanks, extremely helpful. If anyone else has a view on this, or thoughts on the relative adcom prestige perception of of GS / MS / JPM , please let me know.
do b-schools look at candidates the same way if they worked in a hedge fund prior to applying (think Bridgewater as far as prestige).
Bumping for more color, thanks.
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