Undergraduate Major?

Hi everyone, I'm new to the site, and I am looking for some opinions of people who have gone through this process before. I'm at the point in my freshman year where I should be choosing a definitive college major (and building a schedule around it). Currently, I'm a biomedical engineering major at a good (but not great) public state school. I think that the College of Engineering as a whole is consistently ranked around #10 overall by most of the ranking sites I've seen. This college also has a pretty good business school, but it's definitely not at the top in anything (except maybe in accounting).

I had some pretty good grades and credentials in high school (I got into some selective schools like Duke and Caltech), but I eventually chose this state school because of price. I expected to get a graduate degree in engineering after completing my undergraduate work. However, I don't really want to be an engineer. I want to work in some type of business-related field (like maybe in PE, HF, or consulting; although I'm probably not smart enough to be one of the quant guys), and I expect to get an MBA in the future. My question is: if I graduate from this decent state school, what are my chances of landing a job that will help me get into a top MBA program, especially compared to an Ivy (namely Harvard or Wharton)? Would an engineering major (from a lesser school) help me or hurt me into getting one of these jobs, compared, to say, a finance degree from Wharton, or an econ degree from Harvard?

I have a pretty good high school record, and I feel that I would have a decent shot at transferring into these Ivy schools for my sophomore year. I guess the crux of this post is me asking whether the name of a college matters all that much for setting me up for a solid (GSB, HBS, Tuck,...etc) MBA program. I'm also assuming that an MBA from one of those schools would allow you to get a job in something like PE or HF (if it doesn't, please say so).

Thanks for your response, and if you have any questions, feel free to ask.

2 Comments
 

you don't need to get an MBA to work at a top hedge fund. Transfer to an Ivy and go to work straight out of college.

or if your goal is PE, then you still may need to go to an ivy/target school, as in: target school --> IB analyst --> pre-MBA associate in PE --> MBA. this is because b-school students complain about having a harder time getting into PE w/o prior PE experience.

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