Match Me: HS Junior; Finance/Quantitative Finance Major, 1540 SAT

Agree with both Neela and Dadofjersey but will add that any engineering discipline can work, it doesn’t need to be CS. But don’t torture yourself majoring in something you are going to hate JUST for the sake of whatever job it is you think you want.

1- You cannot predict the job market in five years- who is hiring, what they are hiring, what they are looking for.
2- No matter where you go, you STILL need to interview, get the job. No institution randomly distributes quant or IB jobs to anyone whose resume matches what they typically look for. Every year there are grads who don’t get an offer from the places they’ve been gunning for (in some cases since HS) and it’s kind of sad… they trudge off to objectively great jobs in commercial banking or P&C Insurance or being a financial analyst at a leading pharma company-- and they act like they’ve been sentenced to ten years of hard labor in Siberia. They can be doing M&A work at that pharma company (yes, the bankers do the transaction, but someone on the corporate side needs to develop the analytics around “does this make sense for us”), getting a nice paycheck, and slide into depression.

Don’t let that be you. It’s great to have professional goals, but you are going to college to get an education, not to participate in an apprenticeship program for the banking industry. You need a major you love in order to do well, at a college that meets all your other goals.

Start there.

2 Likes