What % of your classmates changed majors away from engineering?

sakky
Wed, 09 Jul 2008 20:45:47 +0000

A real, real question, is how many of those students knew what IBanking was, what it involved, how to get into the field, etc? I am not joking. Look, I’m not ragging on the career (its awesome… if you can break into it), but outside of CC, people working in finance, and Ivy-league students, very few people know what IBanking is – including engineering students in highly ranked state universities. The vast majority of them probably thought that landing a job with Google, Apple, or Microsoft is the ultimate first job. Mentioning Goldman Sachs would get a blank stare from the 22 year olds. Tell people you want to be an investment banker and most people will think of a personal banker sitting behind a table at their neighborhood WaMu.



Yeah, sure, I agree. But that doesn’t take away from the central point that for those in the know, Ibanking is a highly desired job.

Besides, I’ll make the point you made even more general. Outside of CC, how many people can even name 5 or 10 top schools? After Harvard, Yale, and maybe Princeton (and even the last one is questionable), most regular people really start to struggle, and start naming local schools or schools with major sports programs. For example, especially on the East Coast, I continue to find hordes of people who have never heard of Stanford or Berkeley, except perhaps in the context of sports. I knew a girl who graduated from MIT and took a job at Harley-Davidson (in Milwaukee), and she continually runs into coworkers who think that MIT stands for the “Milwaukee Institute of Technology”. Then of course you have the University of Pennsylvania and University of Chicago which have practically zero name-brand recognition among regular people, and who are almost always mistaken for just being regular public schools. Plenty of regular people hear UPenn and they start thinking of Joe Paterno and football.

Hence, I think it is entirely appropriate to look at the CC crowd when it comes to judging careers. After all, the CC crowd actually knows and cares about higher education in a way that regular Americans do not.