Ok, last post in this thread. I have to get some actual work done today.
Particularly at the schools being discussed, Harvard and Princeton, which are very proud of their resources-per-student figures, it would seem quite doable. Why don’t / can’t they know the things you listed? It’s not obvious to me. All three of the schools at which my kids attended had multiple counselors in each business sector. The alumni are active with the school and come and give talks and keep career services plugged in.
Do these clubs exist at all the schools that have produced a successful MBB applicant? If not, how did they manage?
Let me ask this last question: why not just have the club operate only with relevant criteria as discussed above and eliminate the social aspect? Leave that for the social organizations. If the club is capacity constrained and truly does help people place at top firms, why not ask the school for more money so the club can help more students?
People don’t have 5-10 hours casually. You should ask kids how much time they have available on a consistent basis week after week to devote to a particular activity. At some point they drop off. This happens routinely.
Some clubs are selecting kids for 4 years. Some are doing so for 1 year. The clubs selecting for 4 years are looking for a subset of the kids to step up and take leadership positions next year or the year after and put in 10-20 hours/wk. These are non-trivial amounts of time on a campus.
Going back to the topic, which echoed my findings about clubs - there is a niche business in this. It is a good start to make a list of schools with open clubs and schools without.
But take this one step further.
I would LOVE to pay someone good money to counsel my children how to make the most of their experience at their chosen college.
Say, starting at the point when they accept.
What activity do they go for pre-freshman summer? What clubs to join/try for? What social events to attend?
And then after the application process, what did they miss? Is there homework they can do to catch up? What professors are friendly to students? What office hours to attend? Which kids to contact?
This is not tongue in cheek. After all tuition is X, 0.05X is not unreasonable.
I lied … it wasn’t my last post. As @gardenstategal said, anyone can say they’ll spend the time. That also occurred to me when you first brought that up. How is this assessed? “I’m looking at you man, and you don’t seem like the kind of guy who’s going to spend the requisite hours and assume leadership over the next few years. Sorry, you’re not invited.”
Eventually, this is what life becomes. I’m aware of that. But is there not a better way of distributing this information than having it controlled by some kid who may not size your kid up in a favorable way?
@Mwfan1921 , for general IB, I’d say our experience differed from yours. Maybe it’s different for MBB.
There are two kinds of these pre-professional clubs that exist. An example is TCM that I mentioned above where TCM just doesn’t prep you for interviews. They essentially give job training. They replicate a hedge fund manager’s job. The bottle neck is senior analyst time to train the junior analyst. Money is not going to fix the problem. And this is high band width activity. In this kind of activity, some social aspects do come into the picture. Because people are spending large amounts of time together. My son has not been in this mode on campus – so I don’t have sufficient knowledge about how important social aspects are. By the way, this is the kind of club for which commitment is assessed. I hear the Harvard Crimson works the same way. If you are not putting in time, you are dropped after 6 months or a year.
A second kind of example is ACM which is a tech club. Interview prep, resume reviews, advice etc are provided. This is a low band width activity. Any body can come and get advice. Still, the capacity is constrained by the senior kids willing to give advice.
In both these cases, money makes little difference. You can’t pay kids enough to volunteer to do these jobs if they were not fundamentally interested. The volunteers do it without any monetary consideration. These kids think of their time as being worth $50-$100/hr, btw.
Can the university hire resources to advice? No. That person needs to have been in a Google interview recently to be any good. He should have taken courses on campus in the subjects that matter to kids, and gone into an interview to see if his preparation was good enough for the interview.
You can propose anything in theory. A lot of those things don’t work in practice.
When my daughter was interviewing, I looked at which undergraduate schools were most represented at MBB. All of these feeder schools do seem to have competitive clubs.
Those aren’t the only schools represented in an incoming consulting class, but from the remaining students, if you back out the ones attending less represented schools who also have consulting clubs and the ones who have personal/family/social connections, I would guess that the number of students without a significant networking/extra curricular advantage is small.
This is my sense as well. Some of the more competitive “consulting” clubs need specific skill sets and managing a list of 300 participants can be unwieldy for upperclassmen student volunteers.
Also, very few freshman are generally offered a spot, so it is really more of a sophomore thing.
It fascinates me that students nowadays feel they need to spend years preparing for IB and management consulting interviews. Don’t they have more interesting interests to occupy their time?
By the way it is just the IB and Consulting feeders that are like this. On the stem side people find as much time as is needed to help each other out. But it is not continuous help. It is episodic help. And nobody trains all year for an interview on the stem side. It is thought to be a waste of time, even for consulting and IB interviews. The community is closer knit.
I find this concept pretty sad. I understand why it happens but for my D it would have been a challenge. She went to school quite the introvert and being able to join random clubs, meet people and have fun is part of what got her out of her shell a little and really helped her confidence. She is currently a leader in a club that I was shocked she joined her freshman year because it seemed so out of the box for her. But maybe this is why some students choose a “collaborative” environment of a “competitive” one?
My son is a freshman at Brown and he has been surprised how many different types of clubs are competitive to join there. I think he is disappointed as it totally goes against what he thought the Brown vibe was. And he chose Brown because he is undecided in what he wants to pursue and wanted the space and time to pursue different interests- and certainly didn’t want to have to compete and fill out a bunch of applications again when just arriving on campus as a freshman. We have a 2024 DS too who is a similar caliber student/college applicant and we are going to be a lot more conscious of this when touring/looking at schools. Would appreciate names of colleges that have a similar academic caliber but where clubs are more open than competitive.
My son at Brown? probably Economics right now but might change. My younger high school son im not completely sure either but maybe an eventual career in business or law.
Let me offer some joking unsolicited advice :-). Have him do a stem major. And do a bunch of non stem courses – whatever catches his fancy – make sure they involve a large amount of reading / writing. Do a good sophomore internship in stem. All the other non-stem paths (ib, consulting, law) will also be open to him. Regardless of which clubs he is in or not in.
My son’s friend, CS major, went and wrote the LSAT cold, and I think was 3 points short of the max score. STEM is not bad training for a bunch of other stuff.
Sorry, I read DD24. I hate to say it but business and law are probably the fields where it makes sense to look for these clubs unless you are connected.
You can go to a collaborative school, sure. But I am not sure they provide the same opportunities today. There are always outliers, for sure.
