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<p>They weigh the interviews incredibly heavily there. Where you come from is not that important…</p>
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<p>Sure, I would say that the interview (once you get it) is by far the most important component of evaluation, and not just for JSC. Reread my earlier post. </p>
<p>However, where you come from plays a role in getting the interview in the first place. JSC has a list of schools on their website at which they conduct on-campus recruiting. One assumes that it would be easier to get an interview coming from one of their target schools. How you perform in the actual interview itself is another matter, as I said.</p>
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<p>There’s more to selection bias than that. You cannot easily assume that your friends (many of whom are probably Columbia alums) are representative of people in (whichever segment of) i-banking. Since you’re more likely to know the school affiliation of i-bankers who went to Columbia than those who didn’t, your inherent Columbia bias becomes reinforced.</p>
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<p>Why the binary distinction? Clearly, there exists a hierarchy between targets and non-targets. But among the targets, individual ability trumps school affiliation.</p>
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<p>It’s certainly possible depending on how rigidly “interest” is defined, but that’s neither here nor there. Whether the “interest” is more or less than 20%, your assessment of Columbia’s pre-professionalism seems to be off the mark:</p>
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<p>Compared to its peer institutions, Columbia IS “highly pre-professional,” if PhD production (per capita) is any indication:</p>
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<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/799213-post1.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/799213-post1.html</a></p>
<p>In fact, Columbia is the only Ivy not to make the top 50 on this (objective) list. Even Barnard made it.</p>
<p>a) list includes general studies, which is highly preprofessionally oriented because of the need to make it a solid ROI for the student. so don’t be silly and read too much into this data when it is skewed. or when you don’t understand why it would be skewed.</p>
<p>b) columbia probably has more folks than other ivies that enter into education, non-profit and in general social justice work - i will offer anecdotally. would you consider this pre-professional? this is a result of columbia’s rather beautiful diversity in which you can find the hardcore banker and activist basically living next to each other. i mean certainly there are other activisty types elsewhere, but among my friends many have decided to go into teaching (for 3 years columbia out TFA’d every other Ivy and was the number one center in the country) or to unglorious positions in small towns, big cities and foreign countries. every school has the kind of student, my sense is that columbia has a lot of them (particularly in the Ivy or Ivy-like category).</p>
<p>c) as someone in a PhD program, i can count amongst my set of friends a lot of folks in other programs ranging from the sciences to the humanities. there are quite a lot of us out there. i’d say i know as many folks in phd programs as friends who actually went to finance and stayed in it (which now numbers a pitiful few).</p>
<p>d) just because you hate life, doesn’t mean you have to bore us.</p>
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<p>look, I picked 3 top banks and asked friends there what the firmwide statistics announced were. If you have any friends at a BB ask about Columbia representation. I could just have easily chosen other banks, but I wanted some point of reference.</p>
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<p>why the binary distinction, a company might interview 50 first round at X and 5 first round at Y. Y is as good as a non target, there is clearly a spectrum, so either you provide that spectrum or some semblance of it, like tiers, or you say going to any school doesn’t make a difference.</p>
<p>finally perhaps Columbia is pre-professional, but it isn’t finance centric so even if people are not going on to get PHDs, observationally and according the career center, at least 80% tend to be primarily interested in other fields.</p>
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<p>Dude, what the hell. So basically, they’re taking the total number of PHD students, dividing it by the total number of undergrads and then multiplying by 1000. So what?</p>
<p>If what you’re trying to find is what percentage of undergrads go on to pursue PHDs as an estimator of how “pre-professional” the undergrad population is, then this list is useless.</p>
<p>Example:</p>
<p>School A has undergrad population of 100 and grad population of 10. Assume for the sake of simplicity that under and phd last one year.</p>
<p>All undergrads at school A decide to go to grad school, so 0% are “pre-professional.” But, because the grad school has a max population of 10, we get 10/100*1000=100 = Score A. The other students have to go to another school for grad school.</p>
<p>Now let’s look at school B. It looks exactly the same as School A (# under at A= # under at B and # phd at A=# phd at B) with the excpetion that people at B hate phd and just want to work/go to law/medicine/etc. </p>
<p>Because of this, 0% of undergrads at B are going to get a PHD and 100% are “pre-professional” Size of Phd program stays the same and just recruits from other undergrad colleges for Phd class. Score B = 10/100*1000=100= Score of A.</p>
<p>So two scenarios:
School A in which 100% of undergrads are “pre-professional” and school A gets score of 100.
School B in which 0 % of undergrads are “pre-professional” and school B gets score of 100.</p>
<p>Your score on this list tells us little to nothing about the percentage of undergrads at the school that are “pre-professional”. What affects the scores are the sizes of the under and grad programs.</p>
<p>Admittedly your list is objective in the sense that it is backed up by (old) data, but data is meaningless if you don’t know how to interpret it.</p>
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<p>I agree that it’s not a binary distinction, but I don’t entirely agree with the statement that individual ability trumps school affiliation.</p>
<p>First you have to define individual ability. </p>
<p>GPA? If that were true, then why are there people with a 3.6 and didn’t land an interview when another person from the same school with the same Major but lower GPA landed an actual offer? Yeah, GPA does factor into individual ability but there are other things.</p>
<p>Extracurriculars? Again, the more the better (in terms of both quantity and quality) but ECs alone won’t get you in.</p>
<p>Interviewing ability? Yes but that helps you land the job. Some people get dinged before they can even interview.</p>
<p>The list goes on. My point is, you guys are wasting time disagreeing over this point.</p>
<p>Is it common for a Operations Research student to go into I-Banking job? </p>
<p>I know Financial Engineering students pretty much all go to i banking, but what about Operations Research students?</p>
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<p>I am fairly certain that the study tracks whether or not undergraduate alumni/ae receive PhDs, not where they received them. But if you want to look at the (NSF) list which shows the “percentage of undergrads [that] go on to [successfully] pursue PHDs,” here you go:</p>
<p>[nsf.gov</a> - SRS Baccalaureate Origins of S&E Doctorate Recipients - US National Science Foundation (NSF)](<a href=“http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/infbrief/nsf08311/]nsf.gov”>http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/infbrief/nsf08311/)</p>
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<p>Again, with the anecdotes.</p>
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<p>Thanks for the data, this is much more useful. You know better than to give me “fairly certain”</p>