<p>From “Careers in Finance”. </p>
<p>“Firms have lots of different areas and groups within them. In most firms, there is sales and trading which works with owners of securities, investment banking which works with issuers of securities (firms and governments) and capital markets which goes in between the other two.”</p>
<p>So which area of investment banking are you in, where an engineering background is not a particularly attractive qualification?</p>
<p>investment banking, As described in the paragraph I copied in.</p>
<p>As for sales and trading: Engineering is not a particularly attractive background for sales. A more typically outgoing personality type usually succeeds better here.</p>
<p>Some (niche, mostly support) functions on the trading floor are particularly quantitative, but most traders are more street-smart and quick at arithmetic, rather than highly trained in advance calculus.</p>
<p>Good traders need to be quick-minded. Make good gut judgements. Lie persuasively to competitor traders. Most of all they have to be able to take a loss. This is apparently what really sets apart the men from the boys on the trading floor.</p>
<p>My engineering training really didn’t emphasize these particular skills, I don’t know about yours.</p>
<p>Mind you I’m not saying no engineers have what it takes to do work in any of these areas. It is my opinion that a disproportionate amount that get hired get mired in overly-quantitative support specialty areas and wind up working for liberal arts graduates that have more of the truly needed skills at the high end, down the road. But what I’m saying is that a lot of these guys are sought out and hired because they are brilliant , not because they are engineers, and if they succeed down the road in some cases it is despite this training, not because of it.</p>
<p>And mostly what I’m saying is that for most engineering students this whole subject is irrelevant because they are not even in the running for these opportunities, and probably don’t want them either. It’s not their thing. Most engineering students do not attend MIT. So maybe let’s stop harping about non-engineering jobs so much on a thread concerning people who want to be engineers ??</p>
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<p>I never said that a lot of people would be offered these choices. I am simply making the observation that of the top engineering students, a good fraction of them end up leaving engineering, and I am publicly wondering why that is. </p>
<p>I completely agree that the majority of engineering students will actually work as engineers. In particular, almost all of the engineering students from the no-name engineering schools will work as engineers. But again, that’s not what I am talking about. I am talking about the interesting phenomenom that when you look at the very top engineering students, a significant number leave engineering, and I am wondering why it has to be that way. </p>
<p>This is actually an inversion of what you would think would normally happen. In most fields, it’s the less successful and less capable people who tend to leave the field. However, in this case, it is actually the most successful and most capable people who tend to leave the field. In every other field, such a thing would be remarkable. For example, what if a significant percentage of the very top basketball players in the world - a higher percentage than that of the ‘average’ basketball players - voluntarily chose to leave basketball? What if a significant percentage of the very best doctors in the world voluntarily chose to leave medicine? </p>
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<p>Then that means that you’re feeling sorry for a lot of the top engineers at MIT, who comprise some of the top engineering talen of the world. Like the guys who get PhD’s in engineering and then immediately rush off to management consulting. What do you think about them? In fact, MIT actually has a partnership with consulting firms within the Career Services office to HELP its PhD students get jobs in consulting. </p>
<p>I wouldn’t feel that sorry for these engineers who jump to consulting/banking. Obviously they can all get engineering jobs if they wanted to. They just found something better. What I really feel sorry for is the engineering industry as a whole. I feel sorry that they can’t find a way to hang on to their best available human capital. You got some of the best MIT PhD engineering graduates feeling that they are better off turning down an engineering offer. That just begs the question why can’t the engineering firms make better offers? If there were better opportunities in engineering, I’m sure that these guys would stay. </p>
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<p>Hey, don’t take it up with me. Take it up with the banks and consulting firms who continue to scoop up plenty of the top engineers. I guess engineering isn’t THAT hurtful. </p>
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<p>Yeah, but you’ve left out the elephant in the room. I’ll just come right out and say it. A lot of liberal arts majors don’t choose the liberal arts because they are really, as you say, “smarter verbally, more socially oriented and not that interested in the little picture things”. Let’s be perfectly honest here. A lot of liberal arts majors choose the liberal arts and not engineering because, quite frankly, it’s easier. A lot of them just don’t like working hard. In fact, at Stanford and MIT, and every single other elite engineering school, many liberal arts majors were first engineering majors but found out that it involved a lot of studying and they don’t want to work that hard. Many of them figure that they ought to look for a major in which they can coast. </p>
<p>I happen to personally think this is probably the MAJOR reason why so many top engineering students are scooped up by the consultancies and banks. You take an engineering student at a top school and you know that, if nothing else, he worked hard. You can’t really be sure about that about a liberal arts student. There really are a number of liberal arts majors where you can do very little work and still pass your classes, sometimes with very good grades. Hence, a liberal arts degree, even from a top school, is sadly no guarantee of a work ethic. Given the grueling hours of consulting and banking, you gotta make sure that your employees can work hard.</p>
<p>Many engineers would do quite poorly in many liberal arts programs. Engineering is the easier major for these types, because they lack verbal skills. Liberal arts would not be easier for these individuals I know many engineers like this.</p>
<p>I continue to believe that most people who are intellectually capable of studying engineering and do not do so take this route because they are not interested in engineering. Frankly it would be a huge waste of time and effort for them to do otherwise.</p>
<p>Engineers are not trained in verbal communication, and this is extremely important in many areas of business.</p>
<p>Most engineering students are not highly sought after or recruited by investment banks. Only a select few are. And many who are recruited are channeled to specialty support jobs, out of the mainstream.</p>
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<p>Yeah, but what about those people who are NOT intellectually capable of studying engineering? I think we can all agree that many of them simply end up studying a liberal art, especially one of the easy ones.</p>
<p>I’ll put it to you this way. Let’s take the following schools: USC, Texas, Virginia Tech, Penn State, UCLA, Berkeley, Florida, Ohio State, and Wisconsin. These schools all share 2 things in common. #1, they all run highly respecte engineering programs. And #2, they all had very strong football teams this year, all of them finishing in the Associated Press top 25 for the 2005-2006 season.</p>
<p>Now think about all of the star football players on those teams. Honestly, how many of them chose to major in engineering? I don’t know the number either, but I think we can all agree that it’s a pretty small number. Matt Leinart, Reggie Bush, Vince Young, Dwayne Jarrett, Lendale White - none of these people were engineering students. Instead, most of them majored in, unsurprisingly, the liberal arts. Does anybody really think that’s just a coincidence? </p>
<p>I think what’s safe to say is that bigtime football players will choose to major in something that they know won’t require that much studying for them to stay academically eligible to play. Why study hard if you don’t have to? Especially when you know that you’re going to make millions in the NFL anyway, why study engineering? </p>
<p>Look, the truth is, plenty of liberal arts majors don’t choose engineering because they simply aren’t good enough to do it. Either they’re not smart enough, or for whatever reason they’re not willing to put in the study time, or whatever. The point is, they’re not good enough. I agree that there are some people who are good enough but choose not to do it. But there are a significant number who just aren’t good enough. </p>
<p>Hence, the point is, when the banks come calling, when they hire an engineer, at least they have a guarantee of certain minimal standards as far as work ethic and basic intellectual competence is concerned. If they hire a liberal arts guy, they don’t even get that guaranteee. </p>
<p>The truth is, there are some liberal arts students who are just very very lazy. I’ve seen them. They simply don’t want to study. They basically spend their entire 4 years of college just drinking and lounging around. They graduated anyway because they chose extremely easy majors with extremely lax classes. </p>
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<p>Yes, but liberal arts majors aren’t necessarily trained in verbal communications either. I would continue to point to those liberal arts majors where you really can pass your classes while barely even showing up. How strong are your verbal skills going to be when you don’t even go to class? </p>
<p>Again, I have to point out that the sad truth is that you really can graduate from some of the liberal arts while barely doing anything at all. Just because you studied a liberal art doesn’t mean that you developed your verbal skills. Plenty of people in those liberal arts classes don’t hardly say 2 words in class, and they still get passing grades. </p>
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<p>Look. Most students of ALL kinds are not highly sought after or recruited by the banks. 1.3 million Americans earn bachelor’s degrees (of all kinds) every year. I would say that at the very most 5% of them are recruited by the banks.</p>
<p>“Engineers are not trained in verbal communication, and this is extremely important in many areas of business.”</p>
<p>Monydad,</p>
<pre><code> Our engineering program focuses on oral and written communication, and this is an increasing trend in engineering. We expect our graduates to “stand and deliver”, which means to speak effectively to anyone at anytime. We stress how critical communication is.
When I read your posts I get the feeling that you have some biases against engineers that might be a little overstated. Sure, it is a stereotype and yes there are some “cubicle engineers” (as we call them) who cannot communicate well, but I believe they are a minority. Our graduates are effective communicators because our engineering dean believes this is critical to their advancement. It seems like there are less of these cubicle engineers graduating each year.
</code></pre>
<p>I have to agree with Sakky on this one, and could argue that engineers are probably better trained in oral/written communication then their liberal arts counterparts. Like dr. reynolds eludes to there has been an increasing trend in engineering programs to develop communicative skills both orally and written. Our programs require us to write reports/papers/give presentations in a very professional manner preparing us for the real world where as my liberal arts counterparts get none of that training. There grade is nearly entirely based off reading a few books and writing a few papers on them, but go to the real world and that is an extremely unrealistic assignment. So in my view, engineers are in a sense better trained to communicate in the real world.</p>
<p>Honestly there aren’t too many schools Ibanks recruit from anyway. Other than top 25 schools in the country, IBanks usually don’t even bother to look at. I think the liberal art people who can work quite well quantitatively are those people who went to one of those top schools. No doubt a Harvard econ major can do just as well in engineering, but you really can’t say that about all social science majors from lower ranked schools.<br>
From my personal experience, the people I know who got offers from front office Ibank positions aren’t the sharpest people with numbers. Believe me, I go to a pretty damn good school and Ibanks heavily recruit from it and I haven’t met a single Ibanker with the quantitative skill of a top 10% engineer at my school. It’s very easy to add and subtract numbers or divide millions by thousands. If you consider that as top notch quan skill in Ibank, then you will be surprised that grade school students in Asia can do those problems faster than most of the Ivy League students.</p>
<p>The basic issue that I have with the liberal arts is that, sadly, many of the liberal arts at many school have very low minimum standards. You really can complete a liberal arts degree even at a top school while doing very little work and learning very little. That’s why I have to object to the notion that liberal arts students are better trained at communication. That is true only for those liberal arts students who choose to work hard. And the fact is, many don’t.</p>
<p>While I don’t want to make any overly political statements, I would point to the candidates for the last 2 Presidential elections - George W. Bush, Al Gore, and John Kerry. All of them, by their own admission, have stated that they were desultory and lazy students while at Yale. Bush has himself poked fun at his mediocre C average he pulled while he was a drunk frat boy at Yale. Yet Bush actually did slightly better than Kerry did. Kerry once said that he jokingly told his father that D stood for distinction and that he was more interested in learning how to fly planes than in studying. Al Gore was, in his sophomore year at Harvard, apparently did little more than hanging out at the basement lounge at Dunster House than in studying, and had notoriously poor study habits in any case, waiting until the last possible moment to cram.</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2005/06/07/yale_grades_portray_kerry_as_a_lackluster_student?mode=PF[/url]”>http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2005/06/07/yale_grades_portray_kerry_as_a_lackluster_student?mode=PF</a></p>
<p><a href=“http://crm114.com/algore/reportcard.html[/url]”>http://crm114.com/algore/reportcard.html</a></p>
<p>You can’t pull this sort of thing in engineering. If you’re as lazy and unmotivated as Bush, Kerry, and Gore apparently were as college students, you’re not going to make it in engineering. But you can cop that sort of attitude and still graduate from the liberal arts.</p>
<p>Now, some of you may reply that Bush, Gore and Kerry became highly successful anyway despite their prior lack of motivation. True, however, I would argue that that’s due to their pedigree more than anything else. All 3 of them were scions of well-to-do families who were going to hook them up no matter what happened. Hence, all 3 of them surely knew that they didn’t really have to study hard if they didn’t want to. Hence, why not study something easy that will give them lots of free time to do whatever they wanted?</p>
<p>I must agree with those who believe that today’s engineers are well trained in communication skills. I was very surprised at the amount of writing my freshman son was required to do. Four papers and a powerpoint presentation in the first semester, one long term paper and a powerpoint presentation at an engineering conference for the second semester. Tons of practice researching, writing and speaking. It’s a good thing!</p>
<p>1) The point is: why not study something that personally interests you, and will help develop your long-term intellectual and cultural interests, rather than receive vocational training in a field that doesn’t interest you, learning material that doesn’t interest you? That’s more germane than whether the material that interests you happens to require more time than some other field that doesn’t interest you.</p>
<p>2) Anyone for whom development of verbal communication skills is important please do you own investigation. The comments above do not match my own prior experience, or what I perceive of the experience of my nephew who is a current engineering student. Perhaps it varies by school, somewhat. Frankly the notion that the verbal emphasis is likely to be remotely equivalent to that of people who don’t have to take engineering core requirements and electives, which are preponderantly mathematically-oriented, somewhat boggles my mind. but do your own investigation.</p>
<p>Maybe the world is flat too, I haven’t measured or anything.</p>
<p>3) actually ecc a number of Ibankers I worked with were quicker mathematically than I am, and I have degrees in physics and engineering from a pretty decent school. They weren’t well versed in higher mathematics, but they were quick/ native smart at it and knew what they needed to to do the job. Which for most of them isn’t much more than arithmetic, I agree. But they could conceptualize mathematically, as needed. A decent number of them could, anyway. These are smart guys.</p>
<p>But given that we agree that mathematical sophistication is not a requirement for this job, I once again sugggest that engineering training is not the best prep for it.</p>
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<p>But who says they’re not studying something they find interesting? I would submit that the guys who gotten their PhD’s in engineering from MIT obviously must have liked engineering quite a bit. Yet even some of them run off to consulting and banking. I think it’s an entirely legitimate question to ask why that is, and in particular, why doesn’t the engineering industry provide comparable opportunities to them to keep them in the engineering fold. </p>
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<p>My take on the issue is more about the just how demanding the liberal arts degree are. I would submit that a lot of liberal arts students are interested in nothing more than just getting an easy degree without having to work too hard. Again, I would point to Bush, Kerry, and Gore. They clearly weren’t all that interested in learning anything. They didn’t really care. They went to college to get their tickets punched, nothing more. Some of these liberal arts students will actually graduate with very good grades because that’s how lax the standards are in their classes. </p>
<p>I know one guy who took a History class, and basically never showed up, and never did any of the reading. The grading was based on 2 papers (and class participation, for which he got a zero because he never showed up). Instead of doing the reading, he admitted to me that all he did was just took the books he was supposed to read, look them up on Amazon, and read all the comments that users posted about those books, and he just reworded all those comments into a paper (something like using Cliff’s Notes). He got an A- in the class. He would have gotten a solid A except for the fact that he never went to class so he picked up no participation points. Nor was he the only person in that class who had this attitude. He said there were plenty of other people in the class whose motivation to do the work was lackluster at best - with guys boasting about how long it’s been since they’ve showed up to class, or even trying to compete to see who could get the best grade while doing the least of the reading. All of them ended up with pretty decent grades. </p>
<p>So I would ask - exactly how motivated are these people in improving their communications skills? </p>
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<p>I would assert that a strong work ethic is a requirement for the job. And like I’ve been saying, you don’t need a strong work ethic to graduate with a liberal arts degree.</p>
<p>I don’t want to derail the discussion from the many valid points Sakky and many others are making. I will just say that you are off-base in saying that engineering and scientific backgrounds are not highly sought after in at least trading, a major area of investment banking, and I am not talking about support functions, I am talking about actual trading.</p>
<p>But let’s get back to Sakky’s points …</p>
<p>Sakky the particular individuals you are citing are apparently not motivated. Some of those you mentioned apparently managed to achieve pretty effective communication skills though, whether aided by college or not, and some of them apparently also managed to have time during their college career to further their social and leadership skills. Which are equally or more important than quantititative prowess for many jobs in the real world. I think these particular individuals were better served studying whatever they studied, as opposed to say focusing on Heat Transfer and Fluid Mechanics. I bet they have no regrets about it.</p>
<p>Furthermore, irrespective of whether some liberal arts majors are or are not slackers, there are many who are not. The ones the leading investment banks are (easily) able to identify overwhelmingly do not have issues in this regard. Everyone works very hard there. Hardworking former liberal arts majors generally wind up running the place. And in some cases I know of they have a bunch of former engineers to crunch their numbers for them, as well-paid but go-nowhere underlings.</p>
<p>And for the record, the coursework I took in the Arts& Sciences school, in my Physics major, were substantially more difficult to me than my coursework in engineering. Not even close. Engineering courses were my “gut” courses. </p>
<p>If someone wants to be an engineer and take these technical courses, go for it. Nothing wrong with that. I perceived you to be suggesting that people should study engineering because it is harder and therefore somehow “better”. Ignoring whether they care about it or whether it would be more useful to them than other things they could be studying. And I don’t agree with that. There are other considerations that are more germane IMO.</p>
<p>I agree with Sakky. Engineering at most top ranked Engineering programs Georgia Tech, Purdue, Texas-A&M and many other excellent Engineering programs will usually attract large manufacturing and Engineering employers but not many MCs and IBs. Only a handful of highly ranked Engineering programs will attract the MCs and IBs. Chief among them are MIT, Stanford, Cal, Caltech, Cornell, Michigan, Carnegie Mellon, Princeton, Johns Hopkins, Northwestern, Columbia, Penn, Duke, Harvard and maybe Rice. They sometime also recruit at UIUC and UTA, but not as often.</p>
<p>The reason for that is simple. Most top universities do not have good Engineering programs and most top Engineering programs are not part of top universities… and the MCs and IBs do not usually recruit at top departments but rather at top universities. For example, Ohio State University has a top 10 Finance progam, but very few IBs recruit at the Fisher Business School. Dartmouth is not even ranked in Economics and Finance, but its students get top jobs at IBs by the dozen.</p>
<p>That sure seems backwards…are recruiters dazzled by having people from “name” schools even when it doesn’t matter 12 months later?</p>
<p>1) when they go someplace they want their interview slots to be filled with a high proportion of highly qualified candidates. They don’t want to bother sorting out them out so much to find the gems. Time is money.</p>
<p>2) They are snobs.</p>
<p>3) If they are trying to justify #2, they might say that the pedigree can help the firm get hired. Because their clients might be snobs.</p>
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<p>I would actually argue that these people developed extremely effective ‘slacker’ skills and have basically learned how to cut corners to make themselves look busy while actually not doing very much at all. Whether that’s a useful life skill or not is a matter of opinion. </p>
<p>Furthermore, you are presuming that if somebody isn’t spending their time learning quant engineering materials, then they must be spending their time developing their social or leadership skills. I would assert that this is only true some of the time. Like I said, plenty of students may save time by avoiding difficult coursework, and then waste that time drinking and lounging around all the time and basically doing nothing at all. So they have neither any quant skills nor any social/leadership skills. </p>
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<p>The issue is not about who gets to the top, but rather about who gets hired. I have no doubt that there are hard-working liberal arts students and that they will go far. The issue is, how do you know who they are? It gets back to the simple notion of asymmetric information in labor economis. The slacker liberal arts students are all going to claim to be hard working. Grades are a poor indication of whether somebody worked hard because, like I pointed out, there are many liberal arts classes in which you can be extremely lazy and get high grades anyway. So the banks come hiring, they have no easy way to know which liberal arts student is hard working and who isn’t. The easy response of the banks is to then simply hire fewer liberal arts students because they can’t tell who has the work ethic and who doesn’t. At least with the engineers, you know that they worked hard. </p>
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<p>I was not talking about extremely difficult subjects like Physics and Mathematics, which I agree are equally as difficult as engineering. My fire is directed mostly towards the TRUE gut liberal arts majors. While every school has a different set of gut majors, everybody at the school knows what they are. For example, at Berkeley, these would be majors that have the word “Studies” in their name. I find it extremely ironic that these majors that have the word “Studies” in them are so filled with students that don’t want to study. Basically these majors are what I call the “football majors” - if your school has a major football program, then look to see what the football players are majoring in, and those majors will tend to be easy gut majors. Very few star football players major in chemical engineering or physics. </p>
<p>Now, I never said that people should study engineering solely because it is more difficult and therefore looks better. I say that people should study engineering because it provides a strong backup career. The truth is, as I’m sure you’d agree, MC and IB hiring is extremely fickle. I’ve seen people with top grades and top interviews who nonetheless didn’t get hired, and then they might turn around and make a job offer to somebody with quite mediocre grades and had a mediocre interview. So the point is, an engineering degree can get you a decent job in case other things don’t work out. That’s why I advocate an engineering degree. Nothing more, nothing less.</p>
<p>Stop the arguing. Stanford Weill, chairman of Citigroup and one of the richest men on Wall St, couldn’t survive mechanical engineering at Cornell. He almost flunked out of Cornell because he was an engineer. He transferred to A&S and got a degree in econ. He gave up Harvard and went to Cornell because he wanted to be an engineer. I know it’s just one example, but it shows how tough and ridiculous an engineering undergraduate education can be. Stanford Weill is obviously a very brilliant guy and extremely smart. If he cannot survive mechanical engineering, I can’t imagine that most business or econ major can do that well in engineering.</p>