<p>I am currently an undergrad student at Columbia. I applied for transfer admission to Wharton and Stanford. I have got into Stanford, but I have not heard back from Wharton as yet. </p>
<p>I was just wondering, how hard is it to get into the combined BS/MBA at Wharton? Also does Wharton give Joesph Wharton Scholar honors to transfer students on admission. Currently I am leaning towards Stanford, but if I get the Joseph Wharton Scholarship at Wharton I will probably do that.</p>
<p>I guess I should have rephrased that, I received a likely letter, that acceptances will be out later but when they will come out I will most likely to be accepted.</p>
<p>To mantiz</p>
<p>Columbia is an amazing school, but I realized that I wanted to study finance (Columbia does not have an Undergraduate Business school) and so I applied to Wharton. </p>
<p>As for Stanford, its much closer to home in California</p>
<p>Does anyone know anything about the combined BS/MBA program at Wharton? Its one of the main reasons I decided to apply .</p>
<p>Are you in your first year at Columbia? Have you checked out the financial engineering major in SEAS which, I believe, is also open to Columbia College students? Econ-operations research? Have you talked to juniors and seniors about the financial internships they've had? Hard to beat NYC for finance and my S, a junior, has an awful lot of friends who have internships at Lehman, DE Shaw, etc. over the summer, then continue into the school year.</p>
<p>That said, Wharton is the top brand if you are absolutely sure that is what you want to spend your undergrad doing. Being on the West Coast is a drawback, though Stanford's great, of course. </p>
<p>I suspect there must be more to your desire to transfer, which is fine. But certainly Columbia will not hold you back from a future in finance.</p>
<p>Thanks for the advise. Yeah, I might probably stay back at Columbia, unless Wharton offers me the Joseph Wharton Scholar's Program or something.</p>
<p>The main reason is not financial internship's, I am well aware that there are many in the city, but the finance coursework. Except for the new Financial Engineering major, which you have to apply to and it is extremely new, there are not to many finance classes you can take except Intro to Accounting and Finance and Corporate Finance at Columbia</p>
<p>from what i understand, the BS/MBA combo is NOT very big at wharton. most students realize that there is absolutely no point to do it. an MBA is for 1) networking 2) changing careers after a few years 3) necessary for a promotion or something within your company (and in that case, your company pays for it).</p>
<p>here are some stats to support this: a wharton undergrad education teaches you everything an MBA learns in two years, except spread out over 4 years (with liberal arts in between). basically you will have the knowlege. most people come in for the BS/MBA realize its better to start their careers and go back for the MBA a few years later. only 30% of people who went to wharton for undergrad ever get an MBA. that means that a majority found that their wharton education was equivalent to an MBA, and that an MBA was not necessary. i think the statistics were that by the time it came to apply for the "submatriculation" program into the MBA, only 10 bothered applying. 3 were accepted. but honestly, you will def be successful without an MBA if you have a wharton undergrad education.</p>
<p>i have no idea about JWS and if they are offered to transfer students. however, i do know that you don't need JWS to be successful either. it's not like a full honors program that is way better than the rest of the school. i know other schools may have an honors program that has substantially better opportunities post-graduation (Texas comes to mind here). i think JWS is for doing research and whatnot, but you don't need it to be successful at getting a top job or whatever. dunno if JWS comes with a monetary bonus, but that could be a big consideration.</p>
<p>if you want to study finance, you should def go to wharton. i don't think stanford has a dedicated "finance" department or anything (in fact, i don't think it has an undergraduate business school at all).</p>
<p>Sam88 I have recently spoken to a hedge fund manager worth over $100 million. He went to a top ivy league school undergrad where he was an economics major and worked for two years in investment banking and then went to one of the best business schools to get his MBA. I talked to him about the industry today and the benefists of an undergraduate business degree versus an MBA. What he said was interesting. He said that today, while an MBA is really only preferred in certain areas of finance like investment banking and commercial banking, that he has found that in terms of job placement, and career opportuniities, there is no benefit of one having the undergraduate business degree at Wharton then lets say coming out of a top school like Princeton, Harvard, Columbia, Duke ect and majoring in economics or finance. When two candidates apply for a job out of college one from Wharton undergrad and one from Columbia, they are not going to hire the Wharton undergrad over the other, or be necessarily impressed with the other. They will be viewed as two undergraduates from two top schools who expressed and interest and studied in that field.
I would not personally transfer for the reasons that you stated. I would transfer only if you were not happy. If living in the city did not appeal to you or you wanted a smaller student body ect.
Columbia has some of the best internships. Also, in the financial field Columbia has an excellent reputation. You can also take business school classes at Columbia</p>
<p>If the reasons you listed are the reasons you want to transfer, I would reccommend against it at Wharton.</p>
<p>1) BS/MBA - approximately 1 person per year does it. MBA programs want work experience to draw upon - that's the key difference between the BS and MBA. You're really better off staying at Columbia and doing well, and then getting an MBA somewhere.</p>
<p>2) JWS - only to incoming freshmen, and there's no scholarship attached (sorry). (Some people who have loans for fin. aid. get those converted to grants, but this is an extremely rare case anyway, and has been replaced by penn's new fin. aid. policies)</p>
<p>Sam-- Perhaps your definition of finance courses is too narrow. Have you looked in math, applied math, statistics, industrial engineering and operations research, computer science, for example, as well as econ? Also, even some of the economics classes that do not have finance in the title are applicable if you read the course descriptions. For example, each year the econometrics seminar is taught one semester applied to policy and one semester applied to finance. </p>
<p>But, again, I suspect there is some deeper unhappiness. If so, it might be better to address the transfer question more broadly to students at Penn and Stanford to see whether what bothers you about Columbia would not also be true elsewhere, rather than framing it in terms of finance. You won't lose choosing any of these colleges, obviously. Congratulations on your choices and good luck.</p>
<p>Yes, I do realize that I was being a bit narrow in my description of Finance courses. </p>
<p>I will most probably stay at Columbia as I know the campus well after staying here for a year and I have a good 4.2 first semester GPA( I just realized my GPA here will not transfer to Wharton)</p>
<p>I guess I will only transfer if Wharton offers me something I cannot turn down.</p>
<p>What exactly would be something you can't turn down? As someone who will be going to Wharton in the fall and have already gotten the pitch for the JWS Program, I was impressed, but not to the level where if I would to transfer to Penn for it. </p>
<p>It's extra advising (the professor in charge is really cool and actually spoke to us for more than double the time he allotted), but I think you can get the same at Columbia if you were able to get good enough letters of rec from professors after just a year there.</p>
<p>I think you can apply into the JWS program as a sophomore though.</p>