Stanford vs Wharton vs Booth vs Columbia for PE
Hey guys,
Got the big decision in front of me and thought I’d consult the fine minds of WSO for a second opinion. I’ve been accepted to Stanford, Wharton, Booth, and Columbia.
Financial aid includes tuition scholarships at Booth and Columbia, $50k at Wharton, and of course Stanford is still up in the air because of their need based system. No matter which one I take I’ll need some amount of loans, only question is how much.
My plan is to do PE (MM / Growth with operational emphasis) in NYC after graduation. Past experience includes 4 years at a BB in NYC with A2A promote.
What do you guys think?
If your goal is PE, then you've got to go Stanford, even with the cost.
Is that 50k/year at Wharton? If they gave you a full-ride then there could be a minor argument for that.
Booth and Columbia are both great, but won't be nearly as strong for PE as Stanford will be.
$50k all-in; might try to see if I can nudge them but not expecting any movement.
The other piece of it that concerns me is the expense of flying out East to recruit and visit SO. $400-500 a pop adds up quick and I’ve only got maybe $50k cash savings liquidating everything but my 401k
How did you do 4 years of banking and only save $50k?
first off congrats! would you mind sharing your stats?
UG GPA: 3.9 from public Ivy (think UT, Berkeley, UNC, Mich) GMAT: 730
Congrats! I'm still in undergrad so I can't give you any advice on your situation. I do have a similar undergrad profile to you and was curious how you got into Stanford, Wharton, and then almost full rides to Booth and Columbia considering they have lots of IB + Ivy/Ivy level undergrads to choose from. Do you work at GS/MS/JP or are an URM? Also, do you know how 4 years IB is looked at compared to 2 years IB + 2 years PE? I was under the impression that 2+2 was looked at more favorably because of the additional PE experience, which they value.
For PE or bust, I'd take Stanford at full cost. It's still competitive but much higher base of recruiting than all of the other schools listed. I assume you have the right background based on your post. For anything else, I'd take the full ride at Booth, though I'm biased.
The only thing I’m missing really (I think) is the pre-MBA experience. I did recruit as an analyst, but mostly did off-cycle processes and had a bit of a tough time finding a fit that seemed worth leaving the BB and leaving NYC.
Great cycle! Looks like you're finance or bust.
If you're willing to bend a bit on your location preference push come to shove you'd have a much higher likelihood of attaining your goal out of Stanford. Anyway, considering your background and stats I'd take on full freight at Stanford without a second thought, unless there's some sort of exigent circumstance or potential hardship you foresee in case Plan A doesn't quite work out.
But you're a bit of a unicorn applicant so i'm having a tough time envisioning a downside to choosing Stanford for your specific goal(s).
Location thing is a bit of a tough one. Used to be I felt like I didn’t care where I worked, but now I’ve built up a base of friends and network in NYC that’ll take a lot of effort to replicate in a new city (especially a smaller one that isn’t as open to transient types).
Still doing some work around what plan B should be. One of the main reasons I decided to leave banking and do bschool is that I didn’t feel like any of the hours I put in contributed to actually creating or building anything - more interested in being able to directly influence the growth of companies through ownership in PE. Maybe VC could be a good option? Or possibly use consulting as a starting point
VC and PE are both "all in" options in b-school. It's not very feasible to recruit for both. You're going to be seeking internships during the school year for either one, not just for the summer, and there might be certain professors with certain connections who teach certain classes you need to get closer too.
Consulting will frustrate you in many of the same ways banking has.
The lens that matters most when evaluating business school acceptances is how well it enables you to realize your career goals. Everything else is secondary: location, culture, cost, and the rest.
You want to do private equity. You want to do it without having pre-school experience in it. Put plainly, you have an uphill battle ahead of you - you need every advantage you can get.
GSB is the only option for you.
Also, you need to nail down whether you're pursuing venture or buyout. Both of them are pretty consuming paths. The other poster who referred to them as 'all in' is correct.
You need to get a 'pre-internship', which is a 4-8 week unpaid role at a firm in your target industry that you complete in the month or two between your end date at the bank and moving to campus for the semester. You need to get a winter internship, which is the exact same thing but in the gap between the semesters. As everyone knows, the traditional summer internship is the meat-and-potatoes of your school experience.
There are (a) so few roles (b) that are not publicized widely (c) that have such a number of qualified people interested in them that you need to put significant hours into the brute-force process of researching firms, getting in front of people, having face-to-face conversations that give you both a mutual sense of personality and intellectual match so you can decide whether it's worth spending more time together (through one of the three internship options).
I'll quote a bit from a comment I made two years ago to a guy facing almost identical school options (swap HBS for GSB).
You need to be on top of it from the start. Professors are a gold mine; they can put you in touch with former students in the industry who will happily talk with you. The career center office is another resource. The alumni database and LinkedIn are good tools you can mine on your own time. I could talk for hours on this - the point is that you don't just lay back and hit submit on an application form.
There are fewer people exiting school for private equity / venture capital (always lumped together in reports from the career office) as a percentage of the class than who entered from it. This is the game of musical chairs. The people who win are the ones who take all the extra steps and take them early (like I outlined above with all the short roles).
Business school is effectively a full-time job of finding people, writing them emails, and doing calls and coffee meetings with everyone responding to you. Classes are second to that. Schools differ in how dogmatically they treat your commitment to academics - more on that below.
Going back to the school choice question, GSB is important for you because:
I can attest to the strength of that last point. I know a woman who's now a partner at what a lot of people would call a top-10 (if there's such a thing) venture firm who is something of a force of nature. She got herself a position at the fund toward the end of the first year that was a full-time summer internship that she never really wound down from. Venture is all about emails, calls, and meetings that you engineer for yourself, so she never let her output slip. The flexibility and overall culture of the school accommodated it, so she carried it all the way through to graduation. Three(?) years later they named her a partner. It might seem shocking, but it's a testament to her logarithmic outputs as an individual, a culture factor where it's one of the firms that likes to give people great titles for credibility's sake, and the overall point that you can hero your way to great outcomes in life if you look at things differently and really apply yourself.
I'll quote again from the same comment I referenced. The whole thing is worth a read as it's pretty relevant for your situation.
Another factor worth mentioning is that from how you write and seem to think, you come across as the kind of 'lights on' personality that Stanford seems to have a knack for identifying.You probably aren't cookie-cutter. It's rare for a banking-only finance guy to break through the GSB door, which means you write well (resume included) and probably have interesting things about yourself that you highlighted well. I think you would do really well at GSB period. I also think it's important to dispassionately analyze your strengths and weaknesses.
Wharton (which should be your only serious alternative here - no disrespect to the other two at all) is going to be chock-full of people pursuing private equity who were at brilliant private equity shops right before school. You shouldn't put yourself in a position where you're competing with a concentration of people who can outshine you thanks to their prior experience.
It will also do nowhere near as much to help you with venture as GSB will - which also outdoes HBS on that dimension.
One last thing to note is that no one really 'fails' at GSB. You mention a plan B - if you commit to a path, you don't really need one. The class size is so small and the network so supportive that your worst outcome is essentially a less well-known brand of the thing you were chasing.
That is a pretty powerful thing. There are lots of people at Wharton and CBS who can't get into private equity or venture. At GSB, your floor outcome is a smaller shop - like a $250m fund size in buyout or a $100m venture fund - which are still amazing outcomes people on average would pursue relentlessly.
I am not joking when I say you could cold-email someone you have not even the loosest affiliation with, tell them you're a Stanford MBA student and interested in working at their $300m firm in St. Louis, and have a productive conversation.
Good luck, wish you all the best.
Here are a couple other posts I've made on business school decisions.
Turning Down HBS/GSB/Wharton For The Promote-Through
HBS / GSB / Wharton Post-MBA Recruiting
Thanks, this is a very helpful response. How do people usually go about sourcing a pre-MBA internship for the summer before starting? That one could be very tough to pull off given the coronavirus situation.
I'm glad you found it valuable.
Usually this is done through your personal network and cold/lukewarm outreach.
Look, the single most powerful networking sentence in the world is probably "I'm a student". People are never suspicious when a student emails them. They may not answer, but it's never a mean-spirited reaction. Many people love to teach. Many more love to talk about themselves. There's no negative association with an ask a student makes because the automatic assumption is that they're trying to learn.
Most people aiming for a private equity job after school are coming from an investment management role of some kind before school. That means they probably had great grades at a great college (maybe even a private high school before that) and a good job at a strong bank. The typical move is to leverage the network of contacts you have.
You were at a bulge bracket bank. You got a direct promotion.
You have to know analyst friends of yours who recruited instead of taking the promotion. Any of them who aren't matriculating like you for the Class of 2022 are perfect people to explain this to and ask if they can help you chat with their seniors. Ask college friends who did the banking-to-buyside progression too.
If there are particular clients you had really positive interactions with, do the same. Any sponsor you did a sell-side for is a great option.
Any MD in your group you have a great relationship with is as well. Your staffer is probably a gold mine; their job is to know everything about who everyone in the group knows and interacts with.
Grab them sometime in the hallway - just realized this can't happen during remote work, so maybe tag it on the end of a video or call.
"I'm about to start my MBA at Stanford and learned that you can get a leg up by doing an internship before school even starts. I've always appreciated how much you've done for me, and one thing I've learned from you is how hard you work to cultivate relationships. I'd love to practice that. Are you comfortable connecting me to FIRM so I can see if they'll let me kick around unpaid for eight weeks this summer?"
People understand how the game works. You can be fairly explicit here. A lot of people will view it as a plus that an alum of their group is going somewhere in a way that can benefit them in the future.
Super helpful post, as usual. Not to distract from the main topic, but how important are the pre-internship and winter internship if you're going to HBS / GSB from a normal 2+2 background (assuming you're still pursuing PE post MBA)? Are they still a necessity or would it be more relevant for someone looking to move to PE without pre-MBA full time experience?
Defer for year (no idea if you can do that, spare me ms)
I think the most difficult thing here is that you haven't done PE yet so that will be much greater inhibitor of your ability to break into to PE than the school.
If you had strong PE experience and can really speak to your deals, I think regardless of the school you can carve out a good spot in the PE market. I say this because strong individuals who just really understand the deal process from beginning to end (sourcing, thesis building, management team relationship building, structuring, diligence abilities, negotiations, portfolio managing) is rare to find and is more dependent on the individual's deal experience / reps than the school. There are a lot of PE associates who rest on the laurels of their BB / school background but just don't get the full extent of the deal process and driving each leg forward.
Those folks are going to have a hard convincing PE firms to take them on at the Post-MBA level for the long haul (Partner Track). Can someone who is not well versed in all of these aspects of the job pick it up on the job? Sure, but it will come with a lot of growing pains - which the PE firm is trying to avoid most of the time.
I work at PE shop that does venture / growth and on occasion buyout as well and have a lot of exposure to speaking with founders. I've met maybe ~25-30 founders from Stanford / HBS over my 2.5 years at my current post and to be completely honest I didn't find many of them nor their ideas that impressive. It actually made me think twice about applying to B-School myself. Seemed like they got the meeting through their school network but came up short in their intro meetings / pitches or just hadn't fully through through everything. Helped me realize what people often put on a pedestal (HBS/GSB, GS/MS, KKR/BX, MBB, etc.) is a stark contrast from reality and is sometimes a lot of posturing / fluff. However, those institutions are self-selecting in that they are more successful in attracting and admitting those high powered folks in an average sample size who are firing on all cylinders so there's that.
My point is, if you are really good with strong experience you will be able to land a spot regardless of the school.
All the things APAE said makes sense but I would add a few things.
1) I would say you need a backup to PE in case things don't work out. Maybe its a mutual / hedge fund or another institutional asset manager.
2 ) You need some angle to pitch yourself - maybe it's an industry you know really well that a PE fund is focused on and they need someone who can add value in the diligence process through their industry knowledge (generally more relevant for VP+ roles than for Associate).
3) Taking Stanford is not a guarantee that you will get what you are looking for which is PE without PE experience. Funds will care about your value add not your school. Once you are in the interview no one cares about your school. You do need every bit of advantage you can get - this should come in the form of relentless networking and internships howsoever you can manage it. Maybe it's during the school year. I actually think Wharton and (maybe Columbia* - could be wrong with this one) have better networks in PE than Stanford. Stanford has a stronger network in venture capital / entrepreneurship given the obvious symbiotic relationship between Stanford founders and their venture financiers. Whichever school allows you to maximize the network and internships will be most helpful towards your goal.
3) On competition from classmates - you are going to lose out more on this front in OCR vs the guys that are coming with PE experience so you need a workaround (strong networking & internships). However I wouldn't shy away from Wharton just because there's a lot pre-MBA PE folks there. The competition can help elevate your preparation but you will need to find opportunities outside of OCR where you can showcase that strength and preparation. You can make this work to your benefit if you surprise your interviewers with your deal knowledge / investment intuition in spite of not having PE experience.
TL:DR - The school is not going to make the difference here. But how much you hustle will.
Thanks! This is all good stuff - yes, not having had a pre-MBA PE stint is probably the single largest stumbling block. Makes me wonder if I should've just taken that LMM niche industry offer a couple years back...
Seems like the angle here will be to focus on pre-MBA and school year internships in order to bridge the experience gap. Wharton will give me better access to the NYC universe of firms, but I've also been told by a couple of folks in the industry that they exclusively target H/S for recruiting (though it is mostly H/S alums saying this), with the occasional W in the mix. My biggest concern is that W won't provide quite the boost to my brand and network needed to get not only the first job out, but the 2nd, 3rd and so on, up to the fundraise to start my own firm.
From your experience, what are are some different value-adds that growth firms look for in candidates vs buyout firms?
I know for a fact there are a handful of Wharton/Booth people who get into PE without PE experience. That being said the opps probably don't nearly compare to what Stanford can offer. I wouldn't expect aid coming from IB, so it is a question of tradeoffs. I would take Wharton, 50K is a good amount of $ and Wharton offers great PE opportunities.
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