People who went to Vanderbilt for undergrad, where are you guys now?

I just finished my junior year, so while I'm not a graduate I think I have some insight into what Vanderbilt is like for Wall Street and Finance.

The first thing I should note regarding the whole "southern" thing is that while Vanderbilt was historically a southern prep school with placement that reflected such (lots of Charlotte, Houston, Atlanta, Dallas, etc.), in the past decade or so things have mostly shifted to New York. If you want to work in finance in the south few schools, if any, are better than Vanderbilt, but if you want to work in New York Vandy isn't going to hold you back these days. It's true we get comparatively less on campus recruiting and visits than peer schools (Cornell, Brown, Notre Dame, Georgetown, etc.), but that's more a function of distance and having less IB-focused students (consulting is much bigger here) to the point where on a per capita recruitment basis it makes little financial sense for a firm to hold an info session in Nashville (not at all the "middle of nowhere" as you seem to think). Half the time when firms do come here for info sessions it's an excuse for their team to hang out at the bars on Broadway.

Still, firms are increasingly realizing the untapped talent that exists at Vandy and so our recruitment has improved drastically over the past five years with several boutiques (particularly Houlihan, Rothschild, and Lazard) explicitly stating they intend to ramp up recruitment here greatly.

With regards to the success of students vying for IB here, I'd say that we honestly do better than most of our peer schools. One thing that I think often gets overlooked is the competitiveness aspect of recruitment. I talked about this in another thread so I'm just going to paraphrase here, but look here if you want to see it in detail: https://www.wallstreetoasis.com/forums/georgetown-vs-vanderbilt-transfe…

Essentially, at similar schools it feels like half your peers are gunning for the same IB jobs and a lot of the people who make it generally tend to be socially-stunted cutthroat hardos. At Vandy, recruitment is pretty chill and alumni tend to be much more receptive to supporting one another seeing as their inbox isn't getting spammed like those of other schools (the obvious con here being that there are simply less Vandy guys on the street). Additionally, I've heard of friends at other schools being expected to network with EVERY alumni at the firms they were interviewing at. If I'm being honest, I only ever networked with like one or two guys at each firm I got an interview with (usually alumni of my fraternity) and was able to land interviews pretty much everywhere I wanted. My gpa (~3.7) and resume were good, but nothing that amazing either. Before anyone thinks I'm elitist for mentioning my fraternity keep in mind that almost half of Vandy students are greek, so its really not all that exclusive or unique here as it might be at other schools. I think my answer in the above thread sums this point up much better, but essentially while recruitment is objectively worse here the lack of competition here makes getting an offer relatively easy as you're only ever really competing with 40ish other people serious about IB. Becuase of this you don't have to worry about one-upping your peers on gpa, class rank/percentile (which we don't have), or networking since getting an interview is generally a function of demonstrating your own merit rather than standing out among a large set of peers. It's hard to differentiate yourself at Cornell, it's easy at Vandy.

Finally, you'd be hard pressed to find a school with a better balance of fun, academics, career success, and chillness. As much as we sometimes complain about it, the truth is Vandy offers the ideal college experience. The only school that I think compares in this regard is Cornell, but those guys have suicide nets and are overworked, so not they're probably not that chill. While they've cracked down a greek life a lot in the past few years (frats are always getting kicked off campus for stupid reasons), you'd be hard pressed to find better parties at any other top 20 school. While I wanted to go to a "better" college in high school for career reasons, I'm ultimately thankful that I ended up at Vandy because I ended up having a much more balanced and fun college experience and (depending on how this virtual summer goes) am now coming out with my dream job. Essentially, I think Vanderbilt is an underrated school and great path towards IB.