Sligh_Anarchist

You aren't where you went

An interesting perspective from an English and Russian-American relations teacher in Moscow. It seems that the American college admissions frenzy this year has carried over quite far! To Russia, in fact!

nhsharvard

Well, some employers do look at the college you attended. Depending on the college you attend, you can get connections and netwrok with alumni.

owlice

You can "get connections and network with alumni" at pretty much any college, if you set your mind to doing so.

nhsharvard

However, some universities specialize in different fields. Some are better places to network with people in the medicine, business, or other industries.

kelseyg

That doesn't mean anything if you're not motivated enough to seek it out. And if you try hard enough you can find the right connections at almost any school.

galoisien

Some of your professors are bound to be "networked" (there are a lot of professors who graduated at top schools who teach at state schools). If you seek them out they will network you in too (well if you impress them, of course), especially if you wish to research something that piques them as well but you are limited by your school's resources.

Sligh_Anarchist

Even though I am not in college yet (high school junior), I think college is going to be what you make of it. If you work hard enough, you can succeed anywhere. That's my philosophy, at least.

FLVADAD

Where you attend can have some influence, but compared to what you actually accomplish, it is very minimal. People make way too much of where you attend here on CC. It's really not all that critical. It's what you do.

hawkette

Actually, I would disagree with this thread's title, but perhaps not in the way that you might imagine.

Frequently you "are where you went" as it relates to the non-academic side of a college. Hopefully, you chose a college based on academics AND good fit (as determined by you), but when college and the academics is over, there is still you and your personality and the college friends that you made that likely share many of the same interests as you.

So in choosing your college or making that college list, please focus on the whole undergraduate experience that you are going to have on that campus. Many colleges can likely meet your academic needs, but can they meet your personal needs, social and otherwise?

ilovebagels

Interesting how "Columbia" seems to replace "Princeton" once you go international!

prepparent

The school may help you with your initial job, but after five years you're on your own merits. Since most people never stay with their initial job, it's not where you go as much as what you do with the opportunities presented to you.

ken285

... which implies it's easier at some schools than others.

You probably won't find much of a difference between a top 10 school and a top 25 school, but it can become significant when the difference is a first tier school versus a third tier school.

sakky

Yeah, but let's face it. Most people are lazy and aren't going to work hard to establish connections. They are just going to establish their network within whatever social setting they are placed in.

To give you an example, how exactly did Steve Ballmer become the CEO of Microsoft? Don't you think it has something to do with the fact that he was Bill Gates's old poker-playing pal in Currier House at Harvard? Let's face it. Bill Gates ain't exactly the most social guy in the world. In fact, he's so antisocial that people have speculated that he suffers from Asperger's Syndrome (a mild form of autism). The way he met Ballmer is that Ballmer just so happened to be around.

Similarly, many of the early employees at Yahoo just so happened to be Stanford school pals of Jerry and David. Many (in fact, almost all) of the early employees at Google happened to be school pals of Larry and Sergey. Same is true of Cisco Systems. Anna Lee Saxenian has written numerous books and articles detailing the importance of social ties, including college social ties, in the high-tech industry and entrepreneurship, with Stanford University serving as the world's predominant nexus of high-tech entrepreneurial matching and networking. There is a reason why Silicon Valley sprouted up around Stanford and not some other school. Similarly, there are numerous hedge funds and private equity firms that are founded by a few guys who went to college together at Harvard (or, to a lesser extent, Yale).

Look, whether we like it or not, the strongest factor that determines whether you will get a good job is probably social networks/social capital. That's why every jobhunting book and website advises jobseekers - usually as their first bulletpoint - to leverage their social network. I believe I read somewhere that over 90% of all available jobs are never even publicly announced, but are available only to those who have an inside connection. Maybe that's not fair, maybe that's not right, but that is the reality. You can't compete for a job opening that you don't even know exists.

keefer

In most professions, if you went to a top 30 school, u will be a minority at work. I think the only exception are Mckinsey, Bain and BCG, and front office at Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers and the like. It's important to be humble, going to a good school doesn't guarantee one anything in life, but most graduates of good schools continue to exhibit exemplary performance at the work place, that's why they do well, not because of their diploma.

sakky

While that's strictly true, let's face it, those sorts of elite professions are precisely where the bulk of the students of the top schools end up going. I believe I read in the Wall Street Journal that of those Harvard undergrads who went to the workforce, well over 1/3 went to investment banking or related financial services (i.e. hedge funds, venture capital, private equity, etc.). And that doesn't even count the ones who went to management consulting, which is another giant chunk. Similarly, at MIT, nearly half of the graduating class who entered the workforce took jobs in consulting or finance, which is a simply stunning statistic when you consider that most MIT students are engineering students and hence should not be attracted to consulting/finance. Of those who didn't join consulting/finance, many instead joined highly elite technology companies (i.e. Google) or joined startups that were probably founded and largely staffed by other MIT grads.

http://web.mit.edu/career/www/infost...aduation07.pdf