I’ve mistakenly put two above, but I have Calc BC, Physics C, and AP Enviro along with some dual enrollment and a gym class.
I have not taken: APs Chem, Bio, Spanish, French, German, Lit, Lang, Music, Art, and World
My school normally does get some of the top 5%ish people in some top colleges. This year we had 3 cornell, 2 mit, 1 Princeton, 1 Penn, and 15+ top 20s at Cal, UCLA, Umich, NYU, GTech, WashU, BC, Northeastern, CWR, and Johns Hopkins. However, the vast majority of the remaining go to penn state or pitt considering those are our top state schools.
And it depends on the year, but some schools change like we might get some into harvard, yale, cmu, duke, UVA, and UNC.
Different schools feed different industries, functional specialties and geographic regions, as I have said in other threads. If you want to work on Wall St., apply to Wharton and NYU, if you want to work in corporate finance at a Fortune 500 apply to IU or UIUC.
The risk is the percentage of 16/17 year olds who really know what they want to do with any degree of certainty. The OP wouldn’t be the first finance oriented kid who thought they wanted to be a CFO someday and were lured to Wall Street. Not to mention many a CFO started on Wall Street.
Agreed. I was a religion major kid who was drawn to Wall Street. Stuff happens😀
The other thing to note is a typical listed company has 100+ employees in the finance department with only 1 CFO. Great to have ambitions but life has a way of adding perspective that many managing directors on Wall Street can earn more than a CFO so career decisions change.
Great to have a plan but as Mike Tyson says it all changes once punched in the face.
That’s why creating optionality can serve a kid well. Choose the best school you can afford, make the most of the opportunity and work hard.
We have a friend who was recruited by a Wall Street firm while working on his masters in physics at Columbia. A new derivative was based on an algorithm similar to a fluid dynamics equation (or some such thing) that the Wharton MBAs couldn’t understand, so firms were going after STEM majors who could do the math.
Not uncommon at all. The ties between alumni networks, professional relationships with academic departments, sharing of ideas in evolving areas (quant, sustainability, economics, commodities, etc) all lend themselves to specific schools, departments and students having a reputation in a specific area consequently certain schools punch well above their weight in certain areas with Wall Street.
As an example when I was graduating decades ago Wharton was well known for teaching and researching Option Adjusted Spread modeling while NYU had a professor named Ed Altman that had created the Z score as a predictive model for corporate defaults. Wall Street firms in need of expertise in these emerging areas actively targeted their recruiting on these campuses. This trend continues today as WS tends to often be dependent on academia for evolving new approaches, technology or knowledge. .
If you’ll apply to Berkeley, apply to other UCs as well (Irvine, SD, LA). No point in applying to only 1 UC when adding additional ones doesn’t require any more effort.
Someone else stated this but treat all the UC’s as one application. If you apply to Berkeley there is no extra effort involved in applying to the others besides checking a few boxes. May as well get multiple applications for the price of one.
But realize the “price” of one is only referring to the filling out of your information, ECs, and essays, etc. You actually have to pay a separate application fee for each campus.
And OP is studying business so only Irvine and Riverside, in addition to UCB, may be applicable anyway.
If OP is making a statement like this about IU, there’s no reason to look at any schools that would be deemed beneath - especially where the cost is higher than IU and acceptance is not a given as opposed to IU which is a safety.
“I just need to make sure that my parents would be okay with the value of the out-of-state fees at IU compared to another major at PSU due to being in-state.”
You have to decide because if the answer will be my parents don’t see value beyond the cost of Penn State and it’s a great school, then you’re done.
If you want to go OOS, there are solid schools to keep your cost at a low level but given what you what - they won’t be better - or worse than Smeal. Schools like UGA, FSU, Alabama, Arizona, etc.
But IU - assuming the family is willing to spend more - and likely not that much more - would give you the sizzle at a fine price - merit and all.
Edit - the difference is $20k-ish but after IU merit i bet it’s $10k-ish. Not that much different.