In-State Berkeley vs Wharton Undergrad

simba9
Thu, 11 Feb 2021 00:40:19 +0000

It’s been the mid-90’s since I worked on Wall Street, but I would have said at the time that the best way to get a job there was to get a computer science or financial engineering degree, and things have only gotten more computer-based since then. It’s easier to hire someone with a techie degree and teach then finance, trading or IB than the other way around. Half my time on Wall Street was spent learning about fixed income securities, trading and analytics, which I found more interesting than the computer stuff. I worked at a couple of large and well-known investment management companies in San Francisco after that, and the majority of people in both companies were technical rather than purely financial.

I think people overestimate the number of people working on IB deals in the finance industry. It’s like how people assume that if you want to work at Boeing, you should be an aerospace engineer. But there are actually very few of those compared to all the other engineering types who work there, such as EE, ME, CS.