Georgetown vs. Vanderbilt (Transfer Student)

I’d personally recommend against junior transfer if you’re interested in investment banking since most, if not nearly all, recruiting for summer analyst positions will be concluded by the time you arrive at school or a few weeks into the fall semester at the latest. You’re the only one who knows the true impact of the additional financial burden, so only you can truly weight the importance of the cost difference between the schools in your overall decision. I’m a current Georgetown student, and I’d be happy to speak to you more over pm or feel free to take a look at my comments about the school in similar college decision posts. Hope this helps!

I Agree wholeheartedly with post above, junior transfer is not worth it at all for IB.

I'll add my two cents as a current Vanderbilt Student going into IB. While recruiting is definitely worse here than at other schools (our career center also sucks), one thing that I think gets missed a lot on this forum is the competitiveness aspect. Unlike Georgetown and other more IB-focused schools, students here tend to not be as cutthroat and intrauniversity competition is minimal. Additionally, clubs tend to not be as important or exclusive as at other schools like Georgetown, so you'll always be on much more equal footing with your peers. The effect of this is that recruiting is significantly chiller and easier in some aspects than at other peer schools. For instance, I have friends at both Georgetown and Ross and my understanding is that recruiting there often happens through highly competitive clubs and organizations and that the networking expectations are in general much higher (my friend at Ross said he basically had to network with every Ross alum at the firms he was interviewing with). Additionally, you're competing with a group of peers who are much more keen on NY IB.

Having gone through the process at Vandy I can say that if you're determined about IB (and have decent grades) you will almost certainly come out with a good result. The fact is, most Vandy students half ass recruiting and most people who "want to do IB" aren't that determined and get weeded out by the process. It's true less banks recruit here, but that's mostly because of distance and the fact that less students overall are interested. Still, Goldman, Morgan Stanley, BAML, Citi, UBS, Credit Suisse, Wells, Nomura, Roths, Houlihan, MUFG, Lazard, Jefferies, Bair, Harris Williams, SunTrust BMO, Raymond James and more all recruit here (albeit seemingly inconsistently with visits every other year or so by them). Additionally, (I should note I have no formal proof of this) it seems to me that highly interested students tend to be more successful breaking into IB here than at peer schools such as Ross, Cornell, Georgetown, etc. where it seems that literally every other person is trying to get an IB gig and the competition is MUCH more intense.

Essentially my point is this, if you're determined to break into IB (and since you're on this site as an incoming sophomore you're already more determined than most Vandy kids I know) you can make it and have more fun while doing it at Vandy. Obviously I'm biased, but I think Vanderbilt is unique among targets/semitargets for receiving so much recruiting relative to the amount of interested students. When Goldman comes for info sessions, there's usually only ~50 kids in attendance and half of them won't be that serious about IB to give you an idea about your (lack of) competition here. Also, you usually don't hear about Vanderbilt too much on this site simply because there simply aren't as many of us and this site tends to cater to hardos (Vandy IB kids are generally pretty chill and laidback. Probobally because chill kids usually don't shine in the intense processes that exist at other schools).

I know this was a long response, but I hope it was helpful. COVID boredom has been really setting in lately.