Which is more difficult to get into COE or Ross?

bearcats
Sun, 22 Dec 2013 06:48:35 +0000

Short answer: Anyone of reasonable intellect should be able to get into both schools easily, while COE is easier because everyone can “get in”. However, it’s far harder to get through engineering than business. I don’t understand how any of this is debatable.

Let me lay it out in mathematical expressions
P(getting into Ross)P(graduating from ross with a reasonable gpa|getting into Ross) = P(graduating from Ross with a reasonable gpa)
P(getting into COE)P(graduating from COE with a reasonable gpa|getting into COE) = P(graduating from COE with a reasonable gpa)

P(getting into COE) ~ 100%
P(graduating from Ross with a reasonable gpa|getting into Ross) ~ 100%

On the overall, adjusted for admissions
P(graduating from COE with a reasonable gpa) < P(graduating from Ross with a reasonable gpa)

“I think a lot of engineers severely underestimate the skillset business students acquire in Ross”
While that may be true, I think most Ross kids also overestimate the skillset they acquire in bschool. And I am saying this as someone who in the past has gotten A+s in 4 Ross classes barely doing anything (granted they are all portfolio management/derivative related classes which I knew a lot going in), has routinely competed on recruiting trails with Ross grads, interned at bulge bracket trading desk sophomore summer, landed offers from almost every bulge bracket, chicago prop trading firms and MBB for junior summer(I did a lot more interviews than I needed just for the free trips to Chicago and NYC), and as someone who by now has interviewed quite a few Ross kids. I have met a grand total of two truly impressive Ross kids

one kid who ended up at Lazard, and interestingly, I saw him at 14 out of 18 super days I went to (the only ones I didn’t see him at were the chicago prop shop)

the other one was a year ahead of me, dual degree COE and Ross and ended up at Moelis
Side note: In before ThisIsMichigan attempts to mock me for bragging when I am just trying to set the context of my interaction with Ross kids and basis to judge.

This also caught my eye:
“A majority of engineering students at Michigan would be completely and utterly lost in trying to create a business plan or oversee the operations of a large company”
And so would the majority of Ross students. To think you actually learn jack crap from school is foolish.

I do think you guys are both missing something on this debate, however. As my first boss out of school would say, your technical competence (or other people’s perception of the existence of such) keeps you from getting fired and opens the door to advancement, but your soft skills (real or faked, doesn’t really matter) actually advance you. The former sets a floor for your comp, the latter sets a ceiling for your comp. For instance, the top 25% of a computer science graduating class all gets hired into 100K+ jobs. That’s a comp floor because of their highly demanded skill set. This floor is far lower in Ross. However, a large number of these CS grads will end up being grunt coders and have their comp plateau very quickly because they lack the soft skills to raise their ceiling.

Your average COE grad is better in the former, and your average Ross grad is better in the latter. And the very limited people good at both in either school will have a great career trajectory, but you can have a mediocre or even good career having just one of the two.

BACK TO THE OP
“So there isn’t much advanced quantitative finance available and she wound need to take ad advanced math in COE, either as part of CS or add a math minor perhaps.”

What type of quant finance? High frequency trading (a perpetual spiral to the bottom btw)? Quant working in stat arb strategies? Quant working in vol arb strategies? Quant in general portfolio management? Quant developing analytics? Structurer on the sell side (getting killed by Dodd Frank)? Electronic market making on the sell side? All are slightly different skillset and favors some majors vs others. Tell me what your daughter actually wants to do and I can tell you what the target skillset is. If you don’t know, tell me why she wants to be in the quantitative side of finance in general and I should be able to guess what she really wants to do.