Yale vs. Stanford for NYC Finance
One of my friends got off Yale's waitlist, and he is trying to weigh his options, so I thought I could ask you guys for your opinions. Overall, which school is the better option for graduates getting into NYC finance. I know it extremely rare and competitive to go buy side after undergard, but would either school have any benefits in this area.
In terms of fit, they would be pretty much equal. He isn't too worried about location or campus culture. Most of his point of debate revolve around pre-professional aspects: OCR, internships, alumni networking/presence, and NYC employment opportunities. I know it shouldn't be a concern right now, but he is pretty dead set on NYC for work.
In terms of majors, he would be doing Econ/ Stats & Data Science or Econ/ Applied Math at Yale, and Management Science & Engineering at Stanford. So this is where it get's interesting, he wants to have the background for quant finance from undergrad (hence MS & E), but he isn't interest in being a qaunt. He just likes the quantitive side of finance. Although he has said getting a quant finance education isn't a primary concern if Yale pros outweigh Stanford. Obviously Yale STEM is piss poor, laughable at best, so it doesn't have anything close to financial engineering, but again, he prefers to prioritize alumni, OCR, etc.
Overall what would be the better choice for finance. Discounting the aspect of "the undergraduate experience" with student life, weather, location, and overall ability to have fun. He just doesn't care about that.
You posted a previous thread titled "Yale vs Columbia vs NYU Stern" and the common consensus was Yale. Don't know if you're looking for a different answer, but I think you already know Yale is the better option.
Edit: this looks like you're comparing Yale and Stanford, not Yale and Columbia (might want to fix the title). Either way, I would go with Yale for NYC.
Good catch. My bad on that one, it just slipped my mind!!
title doesn’t match content
Thank you for the catch! Slipped my mind.
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I would say Stanford is a clearly better choice for STEM and a slightly better choice social sciences (Econ, Political Science, etc), whereas Yale is slightly better for traditional liberal arts (English, History, etc.). However, the difference between Stanford and Yale in traditional liberal arts is tons smaller than the difference between Stanford and Yale in STEM. Coming from someone at another HYP, I'd say Stanford is the most academically well-rounded school in the country.
I'd go with Stanford. You can get the same bullshit investment banking internship from any decent college, so I'd rather opt for the deeper GSB alumni network in private equity/buy-side than I would for the ~10ish more Yale alumni I'd find at a BB. As long as you're not retarded, I'd doubt you'd have a hard time breaking into NY finance coming from Stanford. The only school that'd give me pause over Stanford is Harvard.
I went to Harvard / Yale for undergrad. A couple years into Harvard / Yale, 99% of the kids I talked to would switch to Stanford in a heart beat, including myself. Much better weather, more relaxed personalities, better social scene, about the same opportunities.
Go to Stanford and please don't look back.
I was an MS&E major at Stanford back in the day. it won’t get you anywhere close to being a quant haha. the rigorous ms&e classes are really at the grad level, and you’re better off doing CS if you actually want to be a quant. most of the kids in my class just wanted to go into finance and MS&E was the most relevant/easiest major in. We have Econ but it’s harder and too theoretical. MS&E is insanely easy in general and only difficult if you really try to go deep into the grad tracks.
Anyways, yeah Stanford is fun. harder to recruit marginally but if you’re on top of your game it’s not a problem. the distance from NYC is a minus but it’s not a real barrier. Yale probably has a super slight edge when it comes to your traditional finance prestige but Stanford blows it out of the park for anything VC/TMT/Tech PE/Tech Banking related. slightly different areas of strength I would say but neither is clearly better or worse in my opinion. there are some banks that don’t recruit at Stanford, but you can probably easily get into processes with them with a bit of networking. some prestigious PE/VC places will offer you roles if you know where to look and are on your game, but I assume Yale has some potential for undergrad PE exits too
I am not sure how long ago you attended Stanford (guessing four years ago?), but MS&E was far from a cakewalk. Three core stats classes (one of them stochastic), two physics classes, optimization, two multivariable math classes, two CS classes, two depth operations classes like stochastic control or mathematical programming. The finance electives also heavily tie in Julia, R, Python and other computation packages. Grad students take all these too and move the median grade up. Granted, it's not terribly difficult to graduate with a 3.8+ even in engineering because Stanford grade inflates, dishes out 4.3s for A+'s, and shows historical grade distributions for all classes so you can plan around, but those classes were at least challenging for me coming from a large public school background.
I was six years ago. so my bad yeah it’s not a cakewalk for everyone and it just depends on people’s predilections for Math/STEM - I went to a large public school as well - pretty unrigorous - but had one of those intense households that made me take the math APs and multivariable calc in middle school. I originally started off doing CS but as soon as I realized I was going into finance I switched immediately to MS&E to chill out for my junior/senior row house years. it’s definitely all relative. I guess what I meant to say is MS&E doesn’t prepare you for quant roles and that it’s generally the easiest engineering major (which on an absolute basis is still harder than 90% of engineering degree offerings from other schools in the US). didn’t mean to make it out to be a cakewalk but I guess that’s what I inadvertently did - ultimately though your GPA ends up fine given the rampant inflation you mentioned and so that’s also where I got the sense it wasn’t too bad at the end of the day - even tho yea I probably averaged an 80% for all the psets and tests.
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