Why would anyone want to go to Wharton for IB?

Hi wallstreetoasis!

If you look at placement rates, top business schools like UVA and UMich all have 25-30% placement rates into investment banking, just like Wharton. However, the competition in Wharton for those jobs is way worse, since obviously admission into Wharton is more difficult than UVA. Why doesn't the caliber of students in Wharton correlate to a larger number of FT offers?

Thanks!

 

Your line of reasoning would make perfect sense if people attended Wharton for only investment banking. That is, however, not the case. Wharton opens many doors that UMich and UVA cannot. PE shops, hedge funds, and other financial services firms that recruit that Wharton do not recruit at UMich and UVA. So, naturally you will have the same or a smaller percentage of the student body at Wharton recruiting for IB. Simply put, students at Wharton recruit less for IB because they have better options.

 

Gotcha. Do you think that Wharton would open up more doors than say Notre Dame's business school for IB, in the case that both students from those 2 schools just work as hard? I'm concerned that a school like Wharton would actually decrease IB recruiting chances because it is so much more competitive.

Thanks!

 

All else being equal, Wharton will always open more doors. Places like Silverlake only recruit at Wharton UG for a reason: Wharton has some of the smartest kids in the world going to school there. That being said, if you're an average student (e.g. you got into Wharton but are below the median for high school GPA or SAT scores), you might do better at Notre Dame for the simple reason that it's easy being a big fish in a small pond than a small fish in a large pond, so to speak.

 

Hmm I'm a bit confused. You mentioned that all else being equal, Wharton would open more doors. But you also mentioned that I might do better at Notre Dame as well, if everything was equal. Choosing a school seems confusing.

 
Sil:

All else being equal, Wharton will always open more doors. Places like Silverlake only recruit at Wharton UG for a reason: Wharton has **some of the smartest kids in the world** going to school there. That being said, if you're an average student (e.g. you got into Wharton but are below the median for high school GPA or SAT scores), you might do better at Notre Dame for the simple reason that it's easy being a big fish in a small pond than a small fish in a large pond, so to speak.

The sheer arrogance in claiming that Wharton has "some smartest kinds in the world" is astonishing.

Undergrad physics/mathematics are far more challenging / rigorous than undergrad finance/business/econ. Graduate school (PhD not MBA) level finance/econ is very challenging though.

 
Sil:

Your line of reasoning would make perfect sense if people attended Wharton for only investment banking. That is, however, not the case. Wharton opens many doors that UMich and UVA cannot. PE shops, hedge funds, and other financial services firms that recruit that Wharton do not recruit at UMich and UVA. So, naturally you will have the same or a smaller percentage of the student body at Wharton recruiting for IB. Simply put, students at Wharton recruit less for IB because they have better options.

To be sure, PE shops, hedge funds, and other financial services firms recruit at UMich, UVA, and UIUC. My firm recruits at both those schools and arguably the best and brightest at MSPHW, as well as occasionally from EBs and BBs.

If UMich is in-state, and you're willing to double-major in Engineering, it might be wise to save yourself $200K and go to UMich. You'll wind up in the same spot. Maybe with less prestige (Idunno I still think UIUC is the best school in the country but UMich and Penn are competing for 2nd and 3rd), but certainly with less debt.

 

There probably is no school that is at the level of Wharton other than Harvard that opens more doors for its students in the finance industry. I attend a target school for IB myself but the sheer quality/quantity of OCR done in Wharton is just incomparably better than those of our school. All the BB/EB/HF/MF from all cities (NYC, SF, London, HK) recruit from the school. At the same time, I did see plenty of people at Wharton or CAS ending up with no offers or no-name MM IB offers, so you will definitely have to perform reasonably well there.

 

That's what I'm concerned about. Do you think that the people at Wharton with no offers could have performed better at a lower tier business school like UVA with the same effort, since the competition there is not as intense? The average GPA at Wharton is only a 3.3, so I'm not sure if OCR would compensate for that.

Thanks!

 

I know some kids at Penn. The GPA is only low because of Wharton's curve-based grading system. The top 20-30% in any class get an A, the next 20-30% get a B, etc. This means that if 30% of the class gets a 100% in a class, a kid who gets 99% will get a B even though he worked almost as hard. You can imagine how the incredible caliber of Wharton students combined with this grading system results in heavy grade deflation.

That said, it doesn't matter in the long run. A Wharton 3.3 all else equal will get far more opportunities than a 4.0 at any other undergrad b-school.

 

You recruit prior to performance coming into play. Having seen it firsthand from within a BB, success in recruiting is totally dependent on: 1) showing up to events and making an actual positive impression
2) the engagement of the recruiting team 3) the engagement of alums within the bank willing to introduce you to their colleagues 4) understanding the process and knowing how to approach it.

 

OP, you would be OK at Mendoza or Wharton if you can get in. All else being equal, I'd go to Wharton. Anecdotally, if you wanted to do IBD and had the grades, you can certainly do it. There are just kids that go straight to PE, HFs, top consulting (MBB) and an increasingly focus on entrepreneurship / start-ups. I don't know the stats for % of kids that go into all of those separate funnels, but it's likely on par or the highest in the country. It's not a function of it being "Wharton is the best", but you'd be hard-pressed to find a better situation given proximity to NYC, highly pre-professional undergrads, strong alumni network (others have it too), opportunities at "top jobs" as previously discussed. I also think there is a much higher % of people @ Mendoza that work in Chicago so if you have a bias towards SF / NYC, it's much easier to do recruiting / take trips on an hour train ride.

 

Because it's highly ranked and a lot of companies recruit on campus.

We can talk all day long about "best schools", but the reality is that it's a roll of the dice at the end of the day: there's a lot of luck involved, from whether that school has an alumni you click with to whether you catch the OCR reps on a day when somebody pissed in his cheerios.

You go to the option you have that will give you the most chances to roll the dice, so to speak.

 

If you want to explore this topic, Malcolm Gladwell has a pretty interesting theory about how it can indeed be better to be a big fish in a small pond. He explores it in his book "David vs. Goliath" in depth but you can google articles/videos as well.

At the end of the day, I do actually believe on average he's right. However, it's in most of our human nature to believe we will be the best at what we do no matter where we go, and we do not probability weight our decisions in the way he gets to study them.

 
ke18sb:

This thread is so amazing - the amount of frustration and head banging from people actually trying to provide sound advice only to have incoherent double guessing of said advice is truly top notch.

Summary of thread in 15 seconds:

substitute "entertained" for "confused". Repeat. The sword throw is fantastic.

Gladiator could be such a great parallel to IBD life advice. Want to know how to get a job? "I wasn't the best candidate because I killed DCFs quickly. I was the best because the crowd loved me. Win the crowd, lose your freedom."

 

Just be prepared for competition at a place like Wharton. If you're set on IB, and you think you can slaughter it in a slightly lower ranked school, it isn't the most unreasonable of ideas to go to the lower ranked school. However, if you fuck up in the lower ranked school, you're finished.

I would... but the truth is I can't sell my soul to myself... http://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/blackknight.asp
 

Quite a bit of an exaggeration there... if you fuck up at any college you're probably finished. I don't see how fucking up at UVa/UMich/Notre Dame would be significantly worse than fucking up at Wharton.

 

Because middle-of-the-pack students at Wharton still get similar better opportunities and placements than the top students at lower-tier schools. Also, placement rates are deceiving when a job at regional boutique counts the same as a top-tier bank - all of which have Wharton as a top target school for recruits.

It's a bit self-fulfilling at this point after decades of reputation-building. Wharton has top students -> banks flock to Wharton to recruit top students -> the most driven finance-interested high school students apply and matriculate to Wharton because of the recruitment ops -> Wharton ends up with the top students.

 

This is like asking why MIT when Berkeley and CMU place as many kids into Google. MIT kids get access to super special opportunities that you only get by being MIT. Tiny unknown quant funds that pay $300k first year, super selective trading firms that pay you half a mil a year by the time you're 27, stealth startups that offer you 1-2% in equity. If you went to MIT, you'd pick these opps in a heartbeat over the standard Google, Facebook, Microsoft. I'm speaking for teach since I don't know IB, but you can understand how it'd be the same at Wharton.

 

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