GPA at grade-deflated schools (UChicago)

Typically, you'll be getting OCR from the local office, so Chicago in this case. More than likely, the people that come to recruit during OCR will have at least one alumn from your school, if possible. They will understand your position and have an idea about the level of grade deflation, as they are only a few years removed from your position, and will remember what it was like. This is not to say you can do badly, but just that the people that come to recruit/read your apps will likely have an idea about what the GPAs are like at your school, and what should be a competitive range.

Well two years ago when I applied to the Fed for an internship they had a 3.8 min, but whatever.

I only knew one kid from my circle of friends who had a 3.8 at UC in econ, and he was Phi Beta Kappa. I now live in Lincoln park and have 4 other roommates. Two of us are in Private Banking at a BB, one works at a $1bill AUM PE fund, one works in corporate banking, and one does options trading. We all just graduated from UC in June. I think only one of us had above a 3.5. One had a 3.3, two had 3.4's, and one had a 2.8 (good thing they din't ask for transcripts until the first day of training; too late to rescind then). I don't know why so many people on this website say you need a 3.8+ to get interviews. In my experience, if you are UChicago econ, and have a good resume outside of GPA, anything 3.3 or higher should at least get some BB or MBB interviews. Once you get the interview, all bets are off, and it's on you to kill it.

However, fair warning, you should consider IBD/S&T/AM/PB in addition to consulting. UC has a MUCH higher hit rate in finance over consulting. I guess it's just the kinda people that go there, but it is harder to break into consulting from UC undergrad. One place I would look at though is Levitt's consulting firm: http://greatestgood.com/

I feel like being as he teaches an UG class there, you would have a good shot at an interview.

Come to think of it, definitely apply to Greatest Good. Probably the smartest collection of people to ever work at the same firm in history. And nearly everyone is affiliated with UChicago, so they must recruit there more than any place else.

close friend just graduated last year with a 3.96 econ from UC, I think you are exaggerating or hanging with the wrong circle of people

close friend just graduated last year with a 3.96 econ from UC, I think you are exaggerating or hanging with the wrong circle of people

I think your one friend is much more of an outlier than anything. Again, classes are CURVED to B, sometimes B-, which means that only the top 50% of students in classes gets B's (B-'s) or above, the other half get B's or below. Thus getting an A is two standard deviations above the average = being in the top 5-15% of your class. Doing this consistently in all of your classes is not easy which is why I think your friend is an outlier. Again the average GPA is a 3.2 (you can look this up and verify) and a 3.25 is necessary for Deans List.

Maybe I am hanging around the wrong group of friends but if my friend group consisted of ppl with 3.8+ GPA's, I would statistically only be able to hang out with the top 1-2% of the class.

well if you're trying to break into banking you should be at least the top 5-15% of your class to begin with

Right which is what a 3.6-3.7 GPA is at my school. However, getting top 5-15% for all of my classes is not necessary to being top 5%-15% of my class year.

From my experience, top strategy consulting firms reject everyone below 3.5 GPA automatically - even if the applicant may have majored in an insanely hard major at a tough school (chemical engineering at MIT).

There are so many HYP kids with 3.7+ GPA's that are dying to get an offer from MBB, OW, Booz, and the like. These firms have no reason to lower their GPA/ other credential requirement because you come from U of Chicago where there is this supposed grade deflation. I am not sure if MBB even recruits out of U Chicago undergrad. Even if they do, my guess is they give out offers to 2-3 kids max from U Chicago. At my undergrad (Yale) the OCR recruiter from BCG told me, at the info session, that typically 300-350 kids from my school apply through OCR each year and they give out offers to 7-8 of them, maximum, in a great economy. So, yeah, the odds aren't that great.

Another thing I noticed is that consulting firms tend to care more about your GPA, test scores, and your raw intellectual horsepower more so than I-banking firms, who give more leeway in your GPA but care more about work experience. You don't need a previous consulting internship to land an interview with MBB, but you'd better make sure you have at least 3.7+ GPA to be competitive. In contrast, you probably don't need 3.7+ GPA to land an interview with banking firms, but you probably need relevant internships to land the interview in first place.

Many ppl on this site seem to not know this, but getting top consulting straight out of undergrad is arguably the toughest job search there is. MBB firms hire way less analysts than associates out of MBA programs. This means it's easier to get top consulting coming out of a top MBA, compared to getting top consulting coming out of a top college. Due to such limited slots for analysts, I think it's actually easier to land BB IBD compared to MBB consulting. BB's hire way more analysts than MBB even if we are talking about IBD and S&T alone.

We do have on-campus recruiting for UC undergrad. It's not exactly a "target", but it does have its own recruiting effort.

Difficulty of school and program are absolutely taken into account when evaluating GPA. For UC, there will almost certainly be a few alum evaluating the resumes, so they should have a good idea of what's good and what's not.

That being said, GPA is not nearly as big of a deal as some of the people above are making it out to be. It's one part of an evaluation process that includes overall academics (GPA, major, test scores, scholarships, etc.), extracurricular experiences (internships, clubs, non-profit, etc.), and leadership (managing people, leading/starting a club, etc). I've given interviews to numerous undergrad applicants from my school with GPAs under 3.5.

I'm a senior at U of C, and I agree that you're exaggerating the grade deflation here. I know a few Econ majors with 3.75+ just in my circle of friends. With something like 20-23% of the school majoring in Econ, you're going to get quite a number of kids with 3.75+, whether there's grade deflation or not.

With that said, you don't need a 3.8 from U of C to get MBB. I didn't have that, and I'm headed to MBB. I'd say 3.5/3.6 plus strong resume and networking will get you an interview. For U of C kids especially, because of its anti social reputation, firms care much more about the personality component than at other schools. At least that's what most recruiting leads told me.

Apply to the Greatest Good, but don't make it your priority. The firm's going through something, with the interns not getting return offers this year.

Finally, I'd recommend F500 instead of banking internships if you want to do consulting full time. When I look at the people with consulting offers (and everybody knows who got which offers because consulting is relatively small at U of C), most did strategy internships at F500. In fact, people with IBD/S&T/PWM internships at BBs did terribly. Some kids with GS, JPM, and BX on their résumé didn't even get first round interviews at some of the forms.