How do firms choose your location during undergrad recruitment?

I'm weighing attending two different targets (UVA and UNC), UNC obviously recruits primarily to Atlanta, but if you get an offer and list BOS/NYC as preferences, how likely is it to get that office vs. if you went to UVA where they have recruiters from NYC/BOS?

 
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First, you really, absolutely, should not be choosing where to attend a 4 year college on the location for a potential consulting offer where you (may) end up spending two years partly traveling. Choose the college on everything else, fit, academics, campus, etc.

In terms of how location works, my experience was really based on firm (for MBB). For McKinsey, it was pretty easy to go anywhere from a target. No real restrictions, saw people end up all over the country for schools like UVA/UNC. For BCG, it was more regional (e.g., someone from UNC would usually end up somewhere in South/Mid Atlantic. Bain was the most office-centric (e.g., you'd be "forced" into an office) for a school like UVA/UNC. Regardless, if you make a case for either of the last two, by all means it can work out and again, I saw it numerous times.

To reiterate, there is going to be minimal difference between these two schools with regards to location of a consulting offer (that you may decide you don't want in a year) and you should not choose your college based off this.

 

Yeah, for my firm there were like 4 tiers or so (this was as of a couple years ago). It was essentially 1) top target schools, 2) semi-target schools, 3) schools we are familiar with, but may not do a ton of recruiting at 4) everyone else. I am forgetting if UVA was 1 or 2 (certainly may have changed anyways), but it was considered a target. UNC was in that 2nd group.

 

I think that second group, but it might have shifted to the first. I saw people from Vandy at my firm end up in NYC, Chicago, DC, Atlanta, Houston and I am sure there were others.

This is why I vehemently disagree with the post below. I saw people from all three of the schools mentioned have a fairly easy time going across the east coast, south, midwest and to a lesser extent west coast.

In no world from my experience does UVA have a better connection to NYC than Umich or Vandy. Is it a better school? Depends on the person but all are viewed pretty evenly in most professional circles. If anything Umich probably has the largest NYC circle of the 3 and Vandy is probably the smallest but that is largely due to the size of the school.

Also the grouping of target vs. semi-target for those schools is just plain wrong in the below. At least two of those schools I am 100% confident on where considered tier 1 at my firm and possibly 2 others (I just can't exactly remember).

 

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