Consulting firms' favorite Undergraduates.

[sakky]

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Of course not all of them like that, but the hardest working ppl I’ve met are the ones who attended relatively obscure colleges. They have the strongest work ethic b/c they know that they don’t have the “brand name” of their degree to ride on.

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<p>Trust me, the top schools have plenty of EXTREMELY HARD WORKING people. Don’t believe me? Perhaps you’d like to check out some of the students at MIT. I think we can all agree that MIT has a powerful ‘brand name’. There are certainly many adjectives used to describe MIT students, but ‘lazy’ would certainly not be one of them. I remember one guy who basically stayed every single waking minute of an entire semester when not in class in one of the MIT Athena labs (the computer labs) in completing a series of long software projects. A lot of times, he didn’t even go home, he would just sleep in the lab, or on one of the benches outside of the lab. Are you saying that he’s lazy? Or that he’s somehow riding off the reputation of MIT? </p>

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My point is that consulting firms and i-banks are often elitist and the expense of hiring quality employees with characters. </p>

<p>Some firms (sadly) would rather take the bottom 10% of Harvard’s class then the cream of the crop from an obscure university. The cream of the crop from an obscure university likely is much better qualified for the job, but the cream of the crap from Harvard will still get the job just b/c they went to Harvard.

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<p>Yeah, perhaps, but then you have to ask why that is the case. I don’t think that consulting firms are hiring bad Harvard students just ‘for fun’. Why would they stupidly throw money away like that. I believe that, if anything, they are doing it BECAUSE CLIENTS DEMAND IT. </p>

<p>Look, consulting is not a game. Consulting firms have to make money just like any other business, and that means attracting clients. And what consulting firms are selling is people. It’s far easier to sell your people to clients when you can say that your people came from Harvard than from a no-name school, even if we’re talking about mediocre Harvard students vs. the best students from the no-name school. The truth is, a lot of clients won’t understand the difference and will just want to see the school brand name.</p>

<p>So if you want to find somebody to blame, blame the clients. They’re the ones who are influencing consulting hiring decisions. As long as clients continue to prefer school brand names, then consulting firms are perfectly economically justified in picking candidates because of their school’s brand name.</p>