Help....I'd appreciate it.

Next year, I'm going to go to the University of Illinois @ Urbana-Champiagn. My dream job is to work on wall street--something in Investment Banking or Hedge Funds, something like that, hopefully on a BB firm.

My question is what should I major in? I know UIUC is not the best school to go to if I want to go to Wall Street. I am accepted into Mechanical Engineering and I'm sure I can change that to something like Electrical engineering or Finance or Economics. The best program at UIUC is definitely engineering (5th best in the nation.)

With that, what do you think I should major in. I also think I will have a few internships before I apply to a job anywhere.

Thanks in advance.

 
Best Response

So, at the risk of being one of those aspergery engineers north of green street, UIUC is at the level of an Ivy League for the College of Engineering, and it's a Big Ten state school for everything else (except accounting, but Wall Street doesn't hire a lot of Accounting majors for some reason)

UIUC students routinely win hackathons, get federal grants, do research, and compare favorably against students from even Princeton.

And the Engineering majors from the Ivies working in S&T know it. So do the MFE and MBA programs.

UIUC also has an excellent Accounting program and Finance program, but more hedge funds, trading firms, and banks now come to the Engineering Career Fair than the Business Career Fair. UIUC Accy is great if you want to work for a Big Four firm or an insurance company, but for an NYC investment bank, it's uktimately a wash. And the MechE degree ultimately gives you more options for work and for grad school.

CS or ECE will give OP more openings to strats roles at a bank. OP is going to spend his first semester or two working on the Engineering Math and Physics sequences and doesn't need to make an immediate decision, and MechE can get OP into trading or IBD of he really works at it, but the Analytics route may be a bit easier at the end of the day. And that would require a CS, EE, or Comp E degree.

James Scholar and Chancellor's Scholar are two good things to pursue. OP may also want to consider joining one of the business fraternities.

The scary thing about CoE is that it's not as selective as the elite schools in who gets in, but it makes up for it in who graduates. You'll know how you're doing after you take your first 200 level class in engineering.

 

So I should stay in engineering...okay. Will EE be that much of a difference to go after NYC than MechE? This may not have an answer, but is EE easier or more difficult than MechE? Thanks for your response, I appreciate it.

 
BBhopeeful:

So I should stay in engineering...okay.
Will EE be that much of a difference to go after NYC than MechE?
This may not have an answer, but is EE easier or more difficult than MechE?
Thanks for your response, I appreciate it.

So EE gives you more backup options for NYC. For MechE, it's basically IBD or General Motors. For CS or EE, it's IBD, Desk Analytics, Google, or Bank IT.

MechE has equally smart people doing the major and a comparable US News ranking, and it probably gives you a few more options than the College of Business does, but CS/ECE give you more options than MechE.

EE is the tougher major; CS is the easier major. The EE students are all a bit smarter, but they have to take ECE 210, 310, etc. In CS, we have 225 (Data Structures) which is a beast of a course in terms of the work but not a terrible intellectual challenge, and then there is CS 273 and CS 473 (Theory and Algorithms) which are our true intellectual weed-out courses.

You may want to consider CS and T&M or CS and a double-major in Finance if the College of Business allows that. Or Econ or Stats if they don't. I really think CS + Stats is a really powerful combination at UIUC. A CS undergrad at UIUC will get you into any firm in the country (at least in IT), and Stats will help big time with any hard science or soft science graduate degree. It will also help if you become a quant, a trader, a portfolio strategist, or a financial engineer.

Engineering is not an easy degree at UIUC. About 40% of the students who start in the College of Engineering switch majors. It's not as bad as the armed forces, but at 3 AM in the basement computer lab while your English major friends are done partying and now fast asleep with some hot girl, you'll wonder why the hell you chose this major. It will pay off, but you won't realize it until a year or two after you graduate.

 

I've thought about CS before but I have never taken a computer class before, let alone AP Comp Sci. So, I would go into CS learning everything from the start, is this a good idea? CS is easier than MechE, wow?

I know about the difficulty of the CofE, thats also a reason why I asked if Finance or an Econ Major would get me to NYC from UIUC.

 
BBhopeeful:

I've thought about CS before but I have never taken a computer class before, let alone AP Comp Sci. So, I would go into CS learning everything from the start, is this a good idea? CS is easier than MechE, wow?

I know about the difficulty of the CofE, thats also a reason why I asked if Finance or an Econ Major would get me to NYC from UIUC.

Have you built programs on your TI-83 or TI-89? That was how I got started. I also did not take CS AP, although I had done a little bit of scripting in highschool for a website. Back then we used a language called Perl which is a bit like Python or PHP.

I was a horrible developer back then. But it was fun. It helped prepare me for CS 125 but we were all kind of on our own for the more advanced courses. (People who'd done C++ before got a bit of a boost for CS 225/data structures).

Look, take CS 125 first semester. Every engineer should take a programming class. I believe you're also required to visavis CS 105 or something, but ask if CS 125 satisfies that requirement.

(These numbers are rough drive-by estimates and for someone who really wants NYC IBD)

So, 95% of the time, no major at UIUC will get you to NYC IBD. The other 5% of the time, you'll land something.

50% of the time (outside of the 5%), UIUC CS will get you into an NYC Analytics job or an HFT role. In the other 50% of cases, you're looking at Caterpillar or Motorola or some reasonably interesting tech role.

10% of the time (outside of the 5%), a UIUC MechE job will get you a junior quant role or maybe a TA role in S&T in NYC. Or land you at a Chicago prop shop (maybe more like 25% of the time.)

70% of the time, UIUC Accy will land you at a large accounting firm in a partner-track role. It would also land you in back office accounting at Morgan Stanley.

70% of the time, UIUC finance will land you at a Chicago insurance company or in a corporate finance role at an F500.

Everyone has the same upper 5% tail. You can get that tail as an English major. But the top 20% outcomes look different, and the median outcome is vastly different.

One important thing you can do, regardless of your major, is apply for a Chancellor Scholarship and join a business fraternity. The Chancellor Scholar's Program is for the top 125 students per year out of 8000 at UIUC and gives you a way to stand out a little bit in IBD recruiting. If you are doing CoE or CoB, you can also apply for a minor in Technology and Management.

 

I got a 30 on my ACT; thus, I'm pretty sure that most of the students in CofE are probably smarter than me. With that, I do want enjoy college and at the same time land a great job, so which major I choose is a big deal haha.

However, I'm also aware that most classes in CofE first year are very similar, so I will have some time to decide on which major I choose to graduate with. I will also definitely look into CS.

Also, I always thought about joining a frat because I love to party, but I'm also scared knowing that it could really affect my grades especially in CofE.

Sigh...if only I applied to good undergraduate business schools instead of engineering haha.

 
BBhopeeful:

I got a 30 on my ACT; thus, I'm pretty sure that most of the students in CofE are probably smarter than me. With that, I do want enjoy college and at the same time land a great job, so which major I choose is a big deal haha.

However, I'm also aware that most classes in CofE first year are very similar, so I will have some time to decide on which major I choose to graduate with. I will also definitely look into CS.

Also, I always thought about joining a frat because I love to party, but I'm also scared knowing that it could really affect my grades especially in CofE.

Sigh...if only I applied to good undergraduate business schools instead of engineering haha.

Hmmm. I think I got a 31 or 32 on my ACT. My SAT score was a lot better. It's just a number. What matters is how well you can do discrete or continuous math, and how well you understand the material.

First year, if you want to leave open the option to do CS, take CS 125 and try to sub it for the engineering programming requirement. Also make sure you take Physics 112 (Electricity and Magnetism) as that opens up ECE 210 I believe.

You'll get a sense of how you're doing with CS 125. If you get a B- in that class, CS probably isn't your major. But if you're finding that you're getting As in the physics classes, and if you do well in Calculus, that's probably a signal that you can cut it somewhere in CoE.

There's not a lot of handholding at UIUC like there was in high school. You get the key to your cinder block dorm room at ISR, you meet your roommate, they throw a bunch of books at you, and say "Good luck. See you at exams. Hope you pass." The good news is that almost all of the engineering and CS classes have 1-2 midterms and homework assignments so you get a sense of how you're doing before the drop deadline.

This is a tough program. Accy is a little (maybe a lot easier.) But engineering gives you more options. If you do Accy, your only choices for grad school are an MAcc (to get your CPA), maybe a doctorate in Accy or an MBA. If you do MechE, you can do a lot of engineering PhDs, an MFE or perhaps even a Finance PhD, an applied Math PhD, and you can probably also do all of the master's versions of these degrees. Not to mention an MBA, too.

There are more jobs you can sit in at a bank. Banks believe that they can teach finance, but they can't teach math. So the more math you have under your belt, the more jobs you have open to you. Engineering isn't quite a Math or Stats degree, but you're using calculus, linear algebra, and probability nearly every day in CS. In MechE and ECE, you will also be applying some differential equations.

 

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