Can Anyone Critique my College List

no caltech or MIT?

I don't think my stats are even good enough for those schools. My SAT is decent (2300+) and I've taken over 13 AP exam, but my GPA is not that high. If you're interested however, I can send my complete profile in a private message.

Your college list is soo broad, mind categorizing for us reach schools, back up, and obviously schools you think you have a shot at. Might as well put Northwestern on your list as its likely similar difficulty/easiness of getting in as Wash U St Louis.

Sure

High Reach: Johns Hopkins, Brown, Georgetown, UChicago Lower Reach: Carnegie Mellon, NYU, Emory, Wash U. Match: UMichigan, UCLA, Boston College, U. Richmond Low Match: UIllinois, UCSD, Georgia Tech

don't get too dismayed about your gpa if your SATs and APs are in fact rock solid. do you have leadership, community service, awards/recognition, and all that other jazz?

i'd recommend ivies, stanford, mit, duke, chicago, northwestern, nyu, georgetown. those are all good schools. you can throw in williams/amherst/middlebury if you don't mind the LAC route. caltech is for a very specific type of person, tread carefully. for publics i'd go with umich, berkeley, uiuc, uva.

at any of these schools you can major in computer science and economics and do what you want afterwards.

don't sell yourself short, roll the dice and see what happens.

I have a good number of awards and I've done many internships. But while I am the president of my school's economics club, my leadership is a bit lacking IMO.

Honestly if I could do it over again I would have applied to (if I wanted to go banking) all the top 20 and a few solid financial safeties (state flagship / good merit schools). If you have a 2300+ and a decent GPA / ec's, just do that. It will save a lot of "what-if's" in the future.

This looks more like a "Google search top 20 schools, copy and paste" list, rather than a personal college list.

Berkeley is a solid school. Its underrated on those newsweek bullshit rankings due to biased towards private but anyone from California will tell you their education is top notch comparable to Stanford. But obviously Stanford offers the bigger name, and network.

If your list includes Wash U, Michigan, and Georgetown, you should include Notre Dame. It's a top 20 school, better than many on your list, and you have a better chance of going bulge bracket at ND than most of the schools on your list (notice I said most, over half, not all). They've really been doing a great job with recruiting lately and have been sending more people BB than a lot of comparable schools in the past few years.

With a list that long you might as well throw Stanford, Cal Tech, and MIT on the list, especially since you seem like a classic STEM kid. Also Rice has good engineering programs if you want to go that route. Houston blows though (Yes, I have lived there before texas people jump on my ass).

Being from California, UC wise, I'd say only Berkeley is worth going to these days especially if you want to do quant. Its not that fun of a school unless you are trying to occupy wall street from 3000 miles away or are really into asian chicks.

Also, 13 APs? Did you go to a public school?

Yeah, I agree, you should shoot for some more top level schools on your list like MIT, CalTech, Stanford. Also, remove Johns Hopkins, Richmond, maybe like Emory or GTech if you really want to? Your list is not to long where you should think you must cut some schools, unless application fees are a problem. Also, I sent you a PM.

Good Luck

Thanks for all the responses. After thinking about it, I'm going to add a few more reaches and remove U. Richmond and Emory. One thing I'm curious about however is what matters more for a prospective quant: a strong engineering education, or a strong background in finance? In other words, to get good quant jobs, and get into good MFE programs, is it better to attend a good business school or a good engineering school? I want to be at a school that's good in both areas, but I'd still like some opinions.

UPDATE: I got accepted ED to Carnegie Mellon (College of Science - Math) and will be going there next fall. Thanks to everyone here for their advice.

I really want to major in Comp. Finance, but I know how competitive the program is. I'm going to apply starting my freshman year instead of sophomore year, like most candidates. That way, I'll have as many chances as possible to apply for the major. If I can't get into comp. finance, I'll probably study Operations Research and Business and minor in comp. finance.

2300+ is way better than decent, smug asshole.

2300+ is way better than decent, smug asshole.

2300+ is way better than decent, smug asshole.

@PEVAN, Way to troll.

@PEVAN Way to troll.

@PEVAN Way to troll.

lol i didnt know what finance was until this year, go to a non target, networked my way to an sa s&t offer at BB. wtf are these kids on bookroids? get some pussy kid!

Edit: wow i'm an idiot and didn't read all the comments. Have fun in college! :)

I'm a finance major at MIT with heavy CS background. Definitely consider applying here - you're pretty qualified from what i can tell. Although MIT's more known for CS than finance, it's one of few schools where undergrads can take classes taught by Nobel Laureates (and they're actually present to teach/mentor, unlike Krugman who taught 1 week in the entire term at Harvard). This semester, i'm taking a finance class taught by Robert Merton of the Black-Scholes-Merton formula. A ton of undergrads end up going into quants since a lot of quants teams hire from MIT. Hope that entices you to at least apply and see.. :)

@Institvte, Taking a class taught by Robert Merton sounds incredible! I knew he was at Sloan, but I didn't know that he taught undergraduates. I'm actually hoping to attend MIT for grad school because Sloan has (arguably) the best quant-finance faculty. What finance class are you taking with Merton btw?