(I do get your point but as an aside, I don’t think playing pro football in Europe is that bad: you get to earn a living while playing the sport you love in a fantastic city. Sure, you’re not making megabucks and you’re not on TV but there are worse fates for a college athlete, like getting hurt, unemployed/unemployable, etc.)
The point was this, do the guys in the NFL view them as peers?
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Of the last 30 or so kids I was asked to help mentor/launch/job search who were DYING for I-banking- exactly zero of them ended up doing that after college.
Unless a kid understands the lifestyle (not just the making lots of money lifestyle, but the “You’re working until midnight this Friday finishing a deck. oh, you’re the best man in a wedding on Saturday? OK, you can have Saturday off…” parts of the lifestyle) the “hopes and dreams” are really just the 22 year old version of “I want to be a ballerina” or “I’m going to be a cowboy when I grow up”.
I would never dismiss a kid’s “dreams” but I think it’s a little weird and enabling for the grownups on posts like these to pretend that one HS internship is enough to validate a kids “long standing interest” in M&A.
It’s also strange that nobody points out two key factors for M&A/I-banking recruiting success- being the hardest working person in the room at all times (even when it’s “not on the test”), AND being near the tippy top math-wise. Yes, you can be a late-bloomer mathematically and still have a fine career in I-banking. But there is a reason that many institutions still require you to disclose your SAT scores. And the ones that don’t, often have a screening test prior to advancing to an interview which is MUCH harder than an SAT.
There’s a reason why some of the high end financial firms are hiring physicists and math majors and electrical engineers and NOT business or finance majors. And it’s because of the level and depth of quantitative analysis. The content of most finance majors is largely tangential to the actual work. Most firms know they can teach the MIT physics major how to do a discounted cash flow analysis in an hour.
OP- keep your mind open. There are lots and lots of interesting careers out there, and focusing on “which college gets me to a career in I-banking” won’t expose you to many of these alternative paths.
The best econometrician I ever hired had never taken an econ course (not a single one). He was a geology major. And before you all yell “rocks for jocks”-- he was the real deal. His “senior thesis” was a model he had built to predict very, very unusual seismic events. Complete with field work (in an actual field- with a research team in Guam).
So for every parent out there bragging that their finance major is working at their college’s “student investment fund” and picking stocks for a 200K portfolio, there are kids out there creating massive systems with tens of thousands of inputs to model the behavior of oceans, mountains, volcanos and glaciers. It is not a big leap from modeling “black swan” geological phenomena to modeling blips in the natural gas market, corrections in the housing market, massive pullbacks in consumer spending, or unexplained drops in bond prices.
Encourage any kid who thinks they want I-Banking to take as much hard-core quant as possible and work their tail off. And if they aren’t interested in quant- heck there are tens of millions of people around the world who love their job who have no idea what investment banking is. And a kid who doesn’t love quant can be one of them!
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The conventional wisdom on this site is that where you went to undergrad only matters for your first job and no one cares about your SAT score after college. For many of the most lucrative career paths, this simply is not true.
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While I don’t disagree with you @blossom, I do want to answer what a student is asking about. But in this case OP ( who I believe is the parent) did acknowledge other possibilities up front.
OP may be gone by now.
For anyone else looking for career suggestions for someone who thinks they may be interested in finance- but perhaps on a track not as “prestige oriented” as M&A-- here are some thoughts.
Corporate Treasury
State level finance roles- budget, bond financing, legislative analyst
A wide range of roles in the insurance industry–ranging from highly quant (risk management, actuarial) to less quant (anything customer facing, claims analysis, etc.) And reinsurance- an area most students don’t know exists, which is basically “how do insurance companies deal with their OWN risks in addition to their customer’s risk?”
Pharma- wide range of roles. Every single clinical trial has a finance team. Every new drug development group has a finance team. Every safety/compliance group has a finance team. And of course- marketing. Groups of people who figure out the dollars and cents behind every “breakthrough” drug, or the costs of developing/modifying an existing compound
Consumer products- probably 50 different types of finance roles, ranging from the obvious (someone on the CFO’s team just doing the blocking and tackling of the monthly reporting) to the less obvious (who helps the marketing team price out the cost of MLB sponsorship “the exclusive cola of MLB” or whether or not it makes sense to buy a Super Bowl 30 second spot for a gajillion dollars). The brand team which decides when it’s time to upgrade or downgrade the packaging, the finance team on the sustainability project team which figures out whether it’s worth switching to a different ink on the box to lessen the toxicity of recycling the packages, etc.
Energy industry, Industrials (companies which make elevator systems, baggage retrieval systems for airports, subway cars, large climate control operations for factories) agriculture.
All of these industries hire finance people for a variety of roles. Most of them are not prestige obsessed- or to put it differently, they are likely to favor graduates of the flagship U where their headquarters are located. Do they recruit at the “highly rejectives”? In many cases yes. But their finance teams are filled with smart, well educated kids who graduated from “not as prestige obsessed as the M&A folks colleges”.
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Agribusiness is usually a great major which may be discounted because it’s in the College of Agriculture at the Land Grant university but offers lots of professional opportunities.
Supply Chain is another great major many HS students don’t know about yet offers great opportunities for development and advancement.
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Agribusiness is a fantastic suggestion- and the “three drivers”- climate change, AI and aerial technology (drones) are going to mean wonderful opportunities over the next few years. Supply Chain feels very “engineering adjacent” for some kids- I don’t know why!!! But great place for a finance kid to land…
Agree 100%!
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Can we get back to OP and their list - not what other majors ?
Not sure if they are coming back but they’d probably want to know what you think of the list given their initial stated desires.
All I’ve seen is people just jumping in telling them their career idea is terrible but here’s others vs chancing them for schools, which is why they came. Haven’t seen their chances given though.
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You should probably add 2-3 more target universities.
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Y’all have drifted too far afield. Future responses need to focus on the OP.
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My response IS to the OP. Finance majors do more than M&A and I-banking. I was pointing out a few of the hundreds of roles that finance majors who don’t go to Cornell or NYU can get, with solid organizations which are not prestige obsessed, and who will be excited to hire the OP.
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Can you please explain your weighting system?
When are you retaking the SAT? A new score could make my guesses of your chances different.
Folks have suggested Bentley. You might also want to look at Bryant…I think you would get merit aid there.
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Folks have suggested Bentley. You might also want to look at Bryant
Might as well add Babson and make it all 3 B’s.
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And while Babson and Bentley (better chance at admission and budget) are often said - not for IB - both are on the College Transitions list as top 25 in per capita…
Both have cross registration with other universities to gain a breadth of classes - even beyond business.
We are also exploring wake forest, Babson, bu, Northeastern and we are instate for Florida so UF, FSU and usf.
Any thoughts and ideas?
Thanks
Not sure exactly but I think the more college level courses you take the higher it goes..
Retaking in August. Hoping for improvement
As you all know career ideas may change, business area focus in colleges may change. This is as if now
Further investigation had led to hopeful about being eligible for financial need.
If that opens some business colleges. Throw some light
Appreciate your input
Thanks
I think with this list, you likely end up at UF, FSU, or USF.
Wake is a wealthy kids school. If I recall, you don’t have need - but if you did, Wake doesn’t like you. They are not aggressive vs. other schools - 1389 first years and only 253 got aid. 37 of 1389 got an average $22K merit. Bottom line, if you get in, you’re likely full pay - which is about $90K for tuition, room and board.
As for Babson, it’s similar with need aid - so another wealthy kid’s school. 27 of 625 got merit aid, averaging $27K. So it’s likely you’re there at over $80K.
Other ideas - I think many are above:
Specific to Wake - Richmond is a tough but more likely to hit cost school. 108 of 840 got over $50K in merit on average. William & Mary is another that will hit cost as will Elon.
As for Babson, Bentley is the cousin - so that’s the similar to that.
There were so many recommendations earlier - ASU and IBIS (if you can get into IBIS) - they have a proven record. U of Denver Daniel’s School is well respected but maybe not a home run for your areas but some.
Fordham has come up…Lafayette is a maybe. U of SC, Bing, Rutgers, U Miami, Georgia Tech…even a Bama or Va Tech.
As I showed repeatedly above, kids are getting into banks…somehow, someway from these schools - and more.
But I don’t think you get to budget from Wake or Babson…not impossible…but highly unlikely based on the #s.
As for qualifying for need, schools like Wake and Babson give to a low percentage…other schools give to a higher percentage but then maybe your test is a bit low.
Did you have UGA on your list? I’d add that too. Maybe Providence too.
Good luck.
We are also exploring wake forest, Babson, bu, Northeasrern
Any thoughts and ideas?
Cost aside, Babson is a special place, not like the others or like most business schools in general. Lots of liberal arts mixed in. Experiential, project based, hands on learning + working in teams. Study abroad strongly encouraged. Small school, more like an LAC for business majors.
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