<p>My Princeton Interviewer is an Investment Banker in LA and he majored in US History</p>
<p>Monydad, I'd appreciate it if you stop mocking this thread by criticizing how engineering majors look at fields outside their study, particularly IBD/cons. As you know; many engineers eventually switch into finance after getting their MBA. It's only natural. A hard-working intelletual (i.e. engrs.) will not settle for an average salary in the midst of a politics infested job atmosphere for the rest of his natural life. People switch into biz for a $$reason$$. As a matter of, if I'm not mistaken you were a physics major at cornell back in the day. You should know what drives people to work on wall-street.</p>
<p>Sakky I don't care if a person goes to Haas or Wharton or Ohio State, biz is EASY. I've taken quite a few advanced math, physics, engineering, business, and lit. courses at different colleges and I'm sure you have as well. I can tell you right now there is NO comparison. Let's be honest here. Biz is a joke compared to engr. For a person who works hard and is smart (I'm assuming people who get into Pton and UCB fit this category), Biz is cake in comparison to engr. In engr., it is natural for many smart, hard working students to still get sub par grades. Furthermore, I already said that biz allows a person to help develop social skills. It's important to show companies that you have a multi-tasking ability and you're outgoing (I talked about this w/ an alumni yesterday for a half hour at the career fair - he's currently working at Goldman in fin. modeling). </p>
<p>In engr., you are sorrounded with people who don't care about socializing and it can be hard trying to get yourself involved in multiple clubs and activities with such a rigorous load. Biz and other majors give you the luxury of doing these critical things. The worst thing a person can do is go to Wharton and shut himself up and be introverted. It is critical to develop people skills. This ties in with what your saying - smooth, nonchalant persona. This is why you don't bury yourself with engineering courses if your prospective field immediately after grad. is biz.</p>
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Sakky I don't care if a person goes to Haas or Wharton or Ohio State, biz is EASY. I've taken quite a few advanced math, physics, engineering, business, and lit. courses at different colleges and I'm sure you have as well. I can tell you right now there is NO comparison. Let's be honest here. Biz is a joke compared to engr. For a person who works hard and is smart (I'm assuming people who get into Pton and UCB fit this category), Biz is cake in comparison to engr. In engr., it is natural for many smart, hard working students to still get sub par grades.
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<p>It is clearly true that business is easier than engineering. However, I would hesitate from saying that it is easy. I would say that it depends on the school you're talking about. In the case of Berkeley, I would say that if you really want to talk about easy majors, I would point to certain majors in L&S. There are certain "football player" majors at Berkeley that are truly easy. Very few football players at Cal major in business. </p>
<p>In short, I would still say that business at Berkeley is an above-average major in terms of difficulty. That's because there are many other majors at Berkeley that are far easier. </p>
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Furthermore, I already said that biz allows a person to help develop social skills. It's important to show companies that you have a multi-tasking ability and you're outgoing (I talked about this w/ an alumni yesterday for a half hour at the career fair - he's currently working at Goldman in fin. modeling). </p>
<p>In engr., you are sorrounded with people who don't care about socializing and it can be hard trying to get yourself involved in multiple clubs and activities with such a rigorous load. Biz and other majors give you the luxury of doing these critical things. The worst thing a person can do is go to Wharton and shut himself up and be introverted. It is critical to develop people skills. This ties in with what your saying - smooth, nonchalant persona. This is why you don't bury yourself with engineering courses if your prospective field immediately after grad. is biz
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<p>I have always agreed that bus-ad gives you more opportunity to develop social skills. However, I would say that you still have the issue of career safety. Not everybody who wants a banking or consulting job will get one, even if they major in business. So you have to legitimately ask what are you going to do if you can't get such a job. Engineering, if nothing else, gives you a backup career.</p>
<p>I really know little about the football team and what they major in. Do you have any charts showing what they major in? Where's you graph of majors arranged by difficulty? What criteria are you using for this?</p>
<p>It wouldn't be hard (but potentially time-consuming) for somebody (not me) to go through the Cal alumni database and cull the names of football players who've actually graduated and tabulated the majors that they graduated from. I would suspect that a disproportionately low number of them graduated from busad, engineering, mathematics, or the hard sciences.</p>
<p>"As you know; many engineers eventually switch into finance after getting their MBA"</p>
<p>I know nothing of the sort.</p>
<p>I am the only one of my engineering classmates that I personally know that went into investment banking. Eventually. I know several others who eventually got MBAs but they are not working in Finance or investment banking. MOst of them are still working as engineers. There may be some, but I don't know of them.</p>
<p>I was actually the only ex-engineer I knew in my MBA class. I'm sure there were others, but none presented themselves to me. Oh wait, now that I think about it there were three others I can recall. For whatever reason they were all from India and we all had assistantships in the b-school computer lab. I don''t think all of them were finance majors, and the one I keep in touch with is not working in finance. None of them got jobs with an investment bank, I can tell you that. I think they were all headed towards MIS careers.</p>
<p>In the investment bank I worked at in New York, in my department there were but a handful of people with engineering undergrad degrees. About 5 that I can recall. Only one of them besides me had actually practiced engineeering at all. And two of them had been undergrads at MIT. MIT is not the template for this kind of career switch in my experience, it is the exception. The opportunities that MIT undergrads had in our department were not available to most engineers from other schools. I never interviewed anyone else like them, anyway, which means nobody else made the cut to that point.</p>
<p>I worked at two other investment banks outside New York, and at those two firms I can't recall a single person who had been an engineer, or even had a degree in engineering.</p>
<p>So maybe "many" engineers do this, as you say. But it is not something that I do in fact well know. I haven't personally seen this migration to any huge extent.</p>
<p>I know far more liberal arts majors who pursued carreers in Finance than I know engineers who did. By a huge mile. Not even close. Finance has not been a prolific destination of choice for engineers that I have personally known along the way. Certainly not an achieved one, at least.</p>
<p>Based on everything I've read and heard, employers, especially in fields such as investment banking, are more interested in seeing that you have the demonstrated the capacity to learn than with what you have actually learned. Sure, you'll take certain classes, hopefully in an area that interests you, and the knowledge you gain in those classes could have a lot to do with your future jobs, but it's more important to show an employer that you will be able to learn how to do whatever specific task they hire you to do. </p>
<p>An engineering degree shows that you have learned how to take complex problems, break them down and solve them. Obviously, it will be hard for an electrical engineering major to end up designing engines for Ford or new alloy metals for AAI, but stranger things have certainly happened. So many engineers end up being competitive for banking jobs (against finance/business/econ majors) because they have shown a capacity to learn and solve problems.</p>
<p>Believe what you want, but Investment banking hiring in the "front-office" departments I worked at, in three different firms, was dominated by individuals with degrees in liberal arts fields.</p>
<p>If you got an MBA from a top b-school, then why would it matter if you majored in engineering or liberal arts. You still studied and graduated from the same program.</p>
<p>They don't hire a degree, they hire a person.</p>
<p>Individual people have various native abilities/tendencies to start out, and these can be cultivated or not cultivated during the course of their education.</p>
<p>All individuals with identical MBA degrees are not identical individuals. Some are preferred over others, by certain evaluators.</p>
<p>The end result of this process was as I've stated in the shops I worked. That's all.</p>
<p>Some of these positions require skills and personality traits that are not optimally enhanced in most engineering schools. Some individuals have these characteristics to such a large degree, innately, that they can overcome this lack of cultivation. Others may not. Even if they get an MBA.</p>
<p>There may even be a degree of prejudice involved on the part of the dominant liberal-arts cohort, who may be predisposed to believe that engineering types may not have the requisite interpersonal and communication skills, in sufficient measure.</p>
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MIT is not the template for this kind of career switch in my experience, it is the exception. The opportunities that MIT undergrads had in our department were not available to most engineers from other schools. I never interviewed anyone else like them, anyway, which means nobody else made the cut to that point.
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<p>But I think that's the key right there. One can apply the economics principle of revealed preference. I think we can all agree that MIT is arguably the best engineering school in the country. Yet as can be seen from the MIT career surveys, a significant fraction of MIT engineering students take jobs in consulting/banking. Hence, those MIT engineers have revealed their preference for what they really want to do. </p>
<p>I would then argue that MIT engineers are not substantially different from engineers at other schools. That is to say, if MIT engineers demonstrated revealed preference for consulting/banking, then I would argue that many engineers at other schools most likely also prefer to go to consulting/banking. Whether they actually receive their preferred choice is a different question. I'm just talking about what their preference is. For example, I'm sure that even at MIT, many of the engineers there wanted to go to consulting/banking but didn't get an offer, so they ended up taking engineering jobs as their 'second choice' or 'safety choice'. </p>
<p>In fact, I think a case could be made that MIT engineers are more committed to engineering than the average engineer. After all, MIT is arguably the best engineering school in the world and therefore attracts the a very high class of engineering employers and the most committed engineering students. I would certainly say that a given MIT engineering student is probably more committed to the engineernig lifestyle than, say, a given Fresno State engineering student. Yet despite all that, a significant fraction of MIT engineering students take consulting/banking jobs. So if even they are revealing their preference for non-engineering jobs, I would imagine that, if anything, it would be even more so at the lesser engineering schools. </p>
<p>But again, it's all about desires and fulfillment. Just because you want something doesn't mean that you're going to get it, and just because you don't get it doesn't mean that you stop wanting it. Just because I can't play for the Boston Red Sox doesn't meant that I don't want to. </p>
<p>The point is, from what I've seen, a lot of working engineers don't 'really' want to be engineers. They'd rather be doing something else, and are only working as engineers because it's the best they can do. But that isn't as dark and as nihilistic as it seems. The fact is, the vast majority of all people in the world don't get to do what they really want to do. I'd love to be an World-series-winning star baseball player for the Red Sox. But I don't get to be. Life isn't always about getting what you really truly want, usually it's about making the best choices you can with the options that are available to you. </p>
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I know far more liberal arts majors who pursued carreers in Finance than I know engineers who did. By a huge mile. Not even close. Finance has not been a prolific destination of choice for engineers that I have personally known along the way. Certainly not an achieved one, at least.
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<p>Well, I think that has to be put in perspective. The fact is, the vast majority of all college graduates are liberal arts majors. Only 5% of all bachelor's degrees conferred in the US are engineering degrees. So it's perfectly natural for banks to have more liberal arts grads just from a pure numbers standpoint. After all, there are far more of them in the first place.</p>
<p>WhileI can't prove this, I would strongly suspect that a random engineer is more likely to end up working in finance than a random liberal arts student. Why do I say this? Basically because about 1/3 of all students at the top MBA programs are former engineers, which is a huge number when you realize that engineers are only 1/20 of the bachelor's degree population out there. And about 1/3 of students at the top MBA programs take jobs in finance immediately upon graduation, and an additional number will do so later in their career. Hence, those numbers seem to indicate that engineers will end up in finance jobs more so than liberal arts students would. I can tell you that B-schools like MITSloan, HBS, Wharton, Chicago, Stanford, and so forth have plenty of former engineers who end up in banking.</p>
<p>"I can tell you that B-schools like MITSloan, HBS, Wharton, Chicago, Stanford, and so forth have plenty of former engineers who end up in banking."</p>
<p>IF you say so, but not at the banks I worked at. In the front office, corporate finance, "real" investment banking divisions of those particular multi-function securities firms. </p>
<p>In the NY shop we hired numerous MBAs from all of those schools, except none from MIT. In fact, if you add Columbia and Yale I think you've covered 90% of the total associate hiring in the department at that shop, for the whole time I was there. None of those individuals from those schools had been engineering undergrads. That's all I'm saying. Besides me, only one of the ex-engineers who made it into that shop came through MBA recruiting, or even had an MBA. The others came as more senior lateral hires via more circuitous paths. Two were hired as analysts out of MIT undergrad, then moved on after two or three years.</p>
<p>As I think about it, I have encountered, and worked with, some Chicago MBAs who were ex-engineers and worked in Finance. But it was at the Fortune 500 company, which was an offshoot of an industrial-type company that had a lot of engineers. Not in the banks where I worked.</p>
<p>The key in finance and quantative fianance is to be numerate, whatever your background is. I do not find finance easy by any stretch. It took me a long time to get a handle on Ito's Lemma and the partial differential equations underlying the Black-Scholes model. Once the model is in the computer, it is easy to calculate the price or derive the market volatility. But understanding the theoretical foundations is quite complex, at least in my opinion.</p>
<p>Well, look monydad, check out the Sloan stats.</p>
<p>30% of the graduating MBA class went to finance of some kind. Furthermore, the data shows that 45% of the class majored in engineering as an undergrad. So unless you are saying that that 45% of engineers maps away from that 30% who go into finance, it must mean that a decent fraction of former undergrad engineering students go to finance. </p>
<p>As far as whether Sloan is successful in placing students into finance jobs at all, look at it this way. Let's break it down. Let's say that all of the people who go into operations/project management and information technology are former engineers (a dubious assumption, but let's go with it). That's only a total of 12.7% of the class. That still leaves 45-12.7 = 32.3% of the class who were former engineers who we have to allot to somewhere. Where are these people going to go, if not finance? The only other options are consulting, general management, marketing, business development, and "other". I don't see any of these fields as being any more appealing to a former engineer than finance would be. </p>
<p>Look at the list of the top employers and you will see that Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, and Lehman Brothers are among the top 12. You can look at other years and find similar such data. The data also shows that finance is the top destination of Sloan MBA's for 2005, 2003 and 2002. </p>
<p>At Businessweek.com, you can view information on the number of grads hired by the various employers. Unfortunately, Stanford and HBS do not participate in this survey. Nevertheless, you can see here that in 2004 MIT was tied for placing the 5th highest number of people into Goldman Sachs out of any B-school in the world. Since HBS and Stanford did not participate, I would assume that they would have placed in the top 5, so really, Sloan is tied for 7th. Still, getting tied for 7th is quite respectable. That's more than Yale. </p>
<p>I think the biggest factor you have to keep in mind is the small size of Sloan. Places like HBS, Wharton, Kellogg, Chicago, and Columbia are simply behemoths compared to Sloan, especially when you factor in the night/part-time programs (Sloan does not have a night/part-time program, but Kellogg, Chicago, and Columbia have quite large ones, and Wharton has an executive-MBA program that is effectively also a part-time program). So clearly those schools are going to have large representation in the top companies simply because their student bodies are so big. Given Sloan's size, I think it stacks up quite reasonably.</p>
<p>I take it back.. we did have one guy from Sloan. Just remembered after reading the above.</p>
<p>And I remember the comments of the Harvard guy who had the final yay/nay vote on his hiring:</p>
<p>" he obviously overvalues the importance of analytics, but he'll learn.."</p>
<p>That's one MBA in over ten years. Evidently Sloan MBAs didn't "float their boat" in that department, for whatever reason.</p>
<p>HE wasn't an engineeer either. None of them were, practically.</p>
<p>Well, like I said, maybe the Sloanies weren't going to your bank(s), but they're obviously going somewhere. Sloan sends the 7th most MBA's into Goldman Sachs of any B-school in the world, which is an amazing stat considering Sloan's size. Sloan does have the 5th highest rated finance subspecialty of all the B-schools, according to USNews, and in the top 5 according to Businessweek That's nothing to sneeze at.</p>