sanguinity

Wharton and Harvard are obviously top.

For the rest, IMO it hardly matters. Columbia might be better than Yale, Georgetown is probably better than cal tech, Dartmouth is better than williams, etc. it doesn't matter. Go to a school with a good reputation that has plenty of alums on the street and some recruiting.

This isn't like college admissions (i see all this .1 gpa, all else equal and crap); why not? Because you are communicate and develop relationships with your "admissions officers" aka your alumni. Your alumni are your admissions officers, and guess what? You can talk to them, ask them for advice, and get their help. Your personality matters far more now than in college admissions, that's why the interviews are so important and are the real test. The resume is the easy part; it gets you consideration.

Network hard, get some finance internships, join the finance club, get good grades, be a leader, play a sport, be a socially competent human being. If you work hard, you'll be successful.

collegegirlRA

Where does the University of Miami fall in?

FutureVpFinance

Probably a non-target

adakinedi

Quick question: Would an undergrad in finance at either University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, University of Wisconsin-Madison, or Ohio State University get me anywhere in terms of IB? What if I went on to do a masters at Michigan, Notre Dame or Georgetown after some work experience in a non-IB finance job?

KalebGetsMoney

Where is ITT Tech? Oh and I was wondering about UW-Madison too.

Commodore15

I doubt that you're a Vanderbilt student because what you describe is not at all true of our recruiting scene; last year all bulge brackets held resume-drops, and only two of them -- JPM and MS -- did not do OCR. Elite boutiques do give us less attention, but Blackstone and Lazard still came. In fact, for a school that has, by comparison, very few students interested in investment banking, Vanderbilt does quite well.

I don't doubt that you're a Texas McCombs student, however, because that is what your username would suggest. McCombs has not ever been anything more than a semi-target, and it is FAR from being a target because it lacks decent NYC placement. Don't get me wrong -- I'm sure McCombs students dominate Houston, but one's career trajectory out of Houston is severely limited.

Trying to draw meaningful differences between semi-targets is a fruitless endeavor; none are measurably better than the others, yet people always attempt to make such a case regardless. I'm almost certain that McCombs receives a higher volume of recruiting than Vanderbilt, but the typical path to IB from McCombs is, if anything, slightly more arduous due to the high volume of students interested in finance. There are few students at Vanderbilt interested in IB; I'd actually say that consulting is the more difficult of the two to break into from Vanderbilt...that's just the way the student body leans. I had the opportunity to intern at one of the three top BBs this summer in NYC, courtesy of a Vandy alum, and I did not meet a single McCombs student, despite having met and interacted with dozens of interns (to be fair, I also only met one other Vandy student, and we both just did grunt work). Target schools absolutely dominated the bank's intern program (I met probably ten or more from each of Penn, Duke, and Stern, and I met another 5 or so from Harvard and Yale). Based upon my experience -- which is certainly not entirely accurate, but which is probably reasonably indicative of the BB undergraduate intern population -- if there were one semi-target that could make the case for being a target, it would be Indiana, from which I met four kids.

The fact of the matter is that not one of the semi-targets is even decent at placing into NYC. Thankfully, I have been lucky enough to land SA in a top group with the same bank for the coming summer, and I'm very content with my progression for being only a college sophomore and believe that I should be able to pull off FT come senior year. I love Vanderbilt, and were I to choose schools again, the only four that I would pick before it would be HYPS. That said, if someone is certain about finance being their true calling, I would always urge them to shoot for a target school. My experience is certainly proof of Vanderbilt opening a door that a lesser school may not have been able to, but I was only able to achieve my current position through sheer luck and considerable networking with alumni, whom I found to be very supportive and whom I consider myself very indebted to.

If I had to go by one of the rankings in this thread, I would probably choose AvidStudent's. However, unless anyone in this thread has worked in HR for multiple BB's, they aren't really in a position to categorize schools. Harvard and Wharton at the top is relatively undisputed; Dartmouth and Duke generally outperform Yale; Northwestern and Georgetown should be one tier lower; and, at least from what I have heard and read, UCLA should not be on the list at all. I will also say that Goldenboy has no idea what he's talking about...he tried to make his list far too specific and it really ended up being unrealistic. JHU and CalTech are simply not recruited (at least for FO), and Pomona's opportunities are leached off of CMC.

In the end, none of these tier rankings are important, and they're really just perpetuated by people who have way too much free time on their hands. It's possible to break into IB from any background, although it requires a larger effort from some.

blbk

Tier 1: Harvard and Wharton
Tier 2: Princeton and Stanford
Tier 3: Columbia, Cornell AEM, Dartmouth, Duke, Williams, UChicago, and Yale
Tier 4: Northwestern, Berkeley Haas, Brown, Georgetown McDonough/School of Foreign Service, Michigan Ross, Cornell, Penn CAS, NYU Stern, UVA McIntire, Amherst, Middlebury, and MIT
Tier 5: USC Marshall, CMU Tepper, Emory Goizueta, Vanderbilt, Boston College Carroll SOM, Notre Dame Mendoza, WUSTL Olin, UNC Kenan-Flagler, Pomona, UCLA Biz-Economics, Claremont McKenna, UTexas McCombs, and Indiana Kelley
Tier 6: JHU, Rice, and CalTech

goldenboy8784

Commodore15, did you intern at BAML last summer? I know from multiple sources that Vanderbilt is extremely well-represented there and it is definitely one of the firm's top 2-3 hunting grounds.

You're right that JHU and Caltech simply aren't recruited at all since they have no alumni in finance. Did you meet any Stanford students? There aren't that mean from what I've seen at bulge bracket banks in NYC.

astonmartinDBS

Yeah I'm not sure where people get the impression that Stanford is such a strong target for finance. It's a great school and the west coast branches probably recruit there pretty heavily, but extremely underrepresented in NYC.

Also, in terms of recruiting, NYU does much better than most people give them credit for.

emprex

You can be a strong target for finance and not work in NYC. BBs recruit for all their hubs, not just Wall Street. Stanford undergrads generally stay on the west coast and work in the tech sector. VC is huge in silicon valley/SF.

Overlord207

Check this out: What banker careers REALLY look like: The DATA | Wall Street Oasis

IUKelleyNerd

Just some input from my insiders perspective. As a FRESHMAN, I see that nearly all of my peers want to major in Finance just to get the IB Job. This seems to make the task quite competitive, but I noticed that only a handful of grad get the IB job.


Personally I am attempting to do Finance and pair it with accounting then possibly work for CPA in order to get the IB job.

akptech

why bother? if you know you want to go into IB then just go for it. you're gonna waste 6 years of your life

Duoduo2

How's CMC?

AfricanStudent32

Are there figures for undergraduate degrees?

If so, would a Dartmouth Economics Degree be better than a BSC from Haas?
Once admitted into Berkeley how selective is Haas?