mikesown

I did not mean to insinuate that a "magical door" would be opened by going to one school over another - I'm merely attempting to explain the general attitudes possessed by students at each school(which I believe, in turn, is affected by the teaching style/classes). Perhaps I was too forceful in my statement. Maybe a better worded opinion would be "If you want to be an engineer for life, Cornell is advantageous. If you know that you're interested in engineering, but really are thinking about pursuing another career for people with analytical mindsets, Columbia is advantageous."

This is reflective of the environment of Columbia and the teaching style. Of course, if you're an SEAS graduate you can go onto an engineering job, and probably get some damn good offers. It's the style of education SEAS provides that, combined with the environment of NYC, in my opinion, encourages students to pursue carrers outside of engineering.

But that's just my take.

bohemianlikeyou

I'm sorry, but I have to disagree. My father is a professor of Electrical Engineering at Columbia SEAS. I talked to him specifically about this thread. He said that there was a pull for students to go to wall street because there is a strong demand for engineering students to work in finances. This is why Columbia has such a strong financial engineering department and why it sends so many students to those types of jobs. The other departments, however, do not train their students to work better with finances. On the track I plan on taking, I only saw one required course that involved the entrepreneurship of my field.

I don't mean to accuse, but for the people saying that Columbia SEAS students are less likely to have actual engineering jobs, have you taken classes at both schools to compare and spoken personally with the chairmen of the departments and professors to really see whether or not they teach for engineering or finances?

bohemianlikeyou

Actually, please just disregard my last comments, obviously i have a bias and am not personally sure whether i'm going to be an engineer or architect out of Columbia SEAS

Skraylor

I really don't understand what you're trying to say here. Really the only dept that actually trains one for finance is financial engineering but even that doesn't train one to be a junior analyst on wall st. ABET exists so that all engineers have the same skills (proficiency in those skills is a person by person basis of course tho) so saying that a department trains one for financing over engineering is ridiculous.

Someone posted, either in this thread or in a different one, about how SEAS kids go to where they think they will be paid for their time the best and i'd say that's a fair assumption.

john5170

This may be a bit off topic, but I was just curious, what finance jobs are better paid than engineering other than investment banking?

mikesown

john5170: Out of SEAS, you'd most likely be a quant, doing things like implementing machine learning algorithms, doing number crunching, etc. Investment Banking is more the style of job where you make presentations and do some numerical analysis, but most of your time/effort is spent dealing with clients directly. Both are incredibly hard jobs in terms of hours, and on a per-hour rate you get screwed the first few years($100k may sound great directly out of school, but not if you're working 100 hour weeks), but if you work your way up, you can earn millions a year.

Skraylor

No. In my experience with friends who went into this field most are jr analysts, i.e. ibankers who make presentations. There are, of course, a few exceptions I know, such as my friend who may be working with JPM in a programming aspect...but he is graduating top of his class in Comp.sci. Most of the really quantitative jobs you either need a masters/phd or need to be INCREDIBLY smart and have an excellent resume to back it up if you only have a BS.