<p>Ummm, and you think that big-time consulting isn’t technical, heavily mathematical, and 24-7? What the [ ] do you think they pay all that money for?</p>
<p>@OP:</p>
<p>[Consulting</a> > Banking? | Wall Street Oasis](<a href=“http://www.wallstreetoasis.com/forums/consulting-banking]Consulting”>Switching from Consulting to Investment Banking | Wall Street Oasis)
[Investment</a> Bankers vs. Consultants | M&I](<a href=“http://www.mergersandinquisitions.com/banker-vs-consultant-why-the-banker-wins-with-a-knockout-in-round-1/]Investment”>Management Consulting vs Investment Banking: Full Comparison)</p>
<p>Banking and consulting are typically mentioned under the same breath, and for good reason.</p>
<p>Does UChicago have a communications major?</p>
<p>^btw, i was being sarcastic…</p>
<p>I just happen to think management/strategy consulting (as far as my understanding goes, which is pretty limited to CC and WSO) is more fun than IB, if “fun” is even possible. It involves more collaboration and presentation (“people skills”) than building mathematical models and killing each other. am I getting the rough idea right?</p>
<p>I don’t mind providing facts to back up my claims. Here are the actual campus recruitment calendars for the firms in question.</p>
<p>Oliver Wyman
[Oliver</a> Wyman Careers- Recruiting Events](<a href=“http://www.oliverwyman.com/careers/18.htm]Oliver”>http://www.oliverwyman.com/careers/18.htm)
All of the Ivies minus Brown, NU, Stanford, UVA, and MIT are consider “core” schools while the University of Chicago is not.</p>
<p>Deloitte Consulting
[On</a> Campus](<a href=“Technology Jobs – Deloitte Tax & Legal | Careers”>Technology Jobs – Deloitte Tax & Legal | Careers)
Duke, Georgetown, Indiana, Michigan, Penn, Stanford, NYU, Notre Dame, Texas, and WashU are considered “core schools” while the University of Chicago is not.</p>
<p>McKinsey & Company
[University</a> recruiting | Careers | McKinsey & Company](<a href=“http://www.mckinsey.com/careers/apply/university_recruiting]University”>http://www.mckinsey.com/careers/apply/university_recruiting)
The Ivies, Stanford, MIT, Duke, Northwestern, Berkeley, Michigan, UVA, Texas, and UNC Chapel Hill are considered core schools while the University of Chicago is not.</p>
<p>There’s no need to hopelessly rationalize why UChicago doesn’t have the same sort of pipeline into management consulting that Duke and Michigan have. As Cue7 has mentioned many times, for decades the College was much smaller and focused almost entirely on producing academics.</p>
<p>UChicago is paying the price for that extreme focus on intellectualism that characterized its existence for the last couple of decades now by having fewer alumni represented at the senior levels at MC firms. I’m not saying being an academic factory is a bad thing, but there are definitely consequences and this is one.</p>
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<p>Goldenboy is absolutely correct; UofC is still trying to shake off that nerdy and socially awkward stigma. Who knows how long it will take before UofC firmly establishes itself with top tier firms and the general public.</p>
<p>However, there have been reports that UofC did very well with recruiting to Goldman, apparently one of the top feeders, though can’t verify this.</p>
<p>I have a very different take about UChicago! Since the beginning of the new millennium, it focused on the brand building effort to attract a very high volume of qualified students for the undergraduate courses and, in my opinion, had done remarkably well. </p>
<p>However, getting into Mck is a totally different ball game! It has very high bar and the selection process is more difficult than most of the high profile companies in the domain of IB.</p>
<p>To be frank, I don’t really understand why it matters at all to go to a “feeder college” to super-elite places like McKinsey. Even if you go to Harvard, you really have a pretty small chance of getting in, and yet, there are tons of people at McKinsey with degrees from places with little brand name. (Go to the websites of any of McKinsey’s worldwide offices and check the profiles of their directors/principals.) This means that your alma mater is not really that important for getting employed at such elite places, so I’m not really not convinced of its relevance here at all.</p>
<p>Its relevance here is that there is no mechanism for a school where McKinsey doesn’t conduct OCR to gets its grads into their door. Even if it is difficult to procure a job offer from one of their “core” schools, at least you get a chance to prove your worth during an interview.</p>
<p>Its not just McK though-its the cumulative effect of a number of key organizations like Accenture and Deloitte not actively pursuing Chicago grads that leads to a relative paucity of UChi grads in this field.</p>
<p>Goldenboy:</p>
<p>The recruiting schedules you offer don’t seem to add up:</p>
<p>1.) McKinsey - as discussed earlier, McKinsey is a crapshoot from anywhere. Very few schools (Duke included) are true “core” schools, because McKinsey tends not to take lots of students from any school.</p>
<p>2.) Deloitte - NYU, Texas, Wash U, Indiana, etc. are considered “core” schools, but Princeton, Yale, Brown, Columbia, Dartmouth, and MIT are not? Why is that?</p>
<p>3.) Oliver Wyman - Where’s Brown? Why does the firm recruit at UVa but none of the other public flagships, like Michigan or Berkeley? What does it mean to be one of the 60-70 schools on this list? </p>
<p>Overall, the data you present contains gaps. I’m not sure whether having an on-campus presence constitutes being a “core” school. Moreover, these firms are just a drop in the bucket - and, outside of McKinsey, don’t really offer a leg up over other careers/firms. If Deloitte recruits at Texas but not Columbia, what does that mean? If Oliver Wyman isn’t at Brown, so what?</p>
<p>On an additional note, none of these firms recruit at LACs that certainly have strong pipeways to any of these places. How do you explain that?</p>
<p>Given recent LSAT data I just posted, my gut instinct is that UChicago is making speedy, positive strides with recruitment. As seen in this article ([College</a> Comeback: The University of Chicago Finds Its Groove - Chicago magazine - March 2011 - Chicago](<a href=“http://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/March-2011/College-Comeback-The-University-of-Chicago-Finds-Its-Groove/]College”>College Comeback: The University of Chicago Finds Its Groove – Chicago Magazine)) 30 years ago, no students even bothered to sign up for interviews with leading firms, so the firms began to look elsewhere. That’s certainly changing, and changing quickly as students grow more interested in these industries.</p>
<p>Especially for the undergraduate level and outside of the tippy top (Harvard, Stanford etc.), I always felt that comparable schools provide comparable opportunities, disregarding whether a particular firm recruits on campus or not. Put another way, if a student is deciding between Williams and Duke or Brown and Northwestern, I really wouldn’t think outcomes would be that different at one school than another. Sure, maybe one firm prefers and has a better recruitment culture at NU than Brown or Williams, but if a student wants a certain industry (IB, consulting, etc.), the chances are about the same anywhere.</p>
<p>Do you dispute the above?</p>
<p>Goldenboy said:</p>
<p>“its the cumulative effect of a number of key organizations like Accenture and Deloitte not actively pursuing Chicago grads that leads to a relative paucity of UChi grads in this field.”</p>
<p>Again, I’m not buying that. If someone is dead set on Deloitte, it might not make sense to go to UChicago (or, apparently, Yale or Princeton). If someone is interested in the industry, I think, outside of the tippy top, all these schools offer great options. Whether you got to Brown or Amherst or Duke or Northwestern, opportunities will be quite similar (outside, again, of say a place like McKinsey).</p>
<p>One additional note - while some of these organizations don’t recruit on campus, UChicago benefits from all of the career fairs and headquarters located in the city of Chicago. If a student really wants a particular firm, there are opportunities to go downtown and get a foot in the door. At the end of the day, these firms all look for talent, whether they have screening interviews on campus or not. The talent pool at UChicago is increasing markedly - by any possible metric. That, to me, indicates a convergence of interests.</p>
<p>
This is just speculation on your fact based on the academic reputations of these schools which doesn’t neccessarily correlate with their attractiveness in the eyes of corporate firms. There are a plethora of consulting firms that hire 5-10 students from Duke/Penn each year that don’t recruit as extensively or at all at UChicago.</p>
<p>On LinkedIn, there are currently 28 Associate Consultants from Duke at Bain, 14 from Northwestern, and only 6 from UChicago. ~50 from Harvard/Stanford, 25 from Yale, ~35 from Penn (not sure how many are Wharton vs. non-Wharton) and 17 from Princeton.</p>
<p>Harvard and Stanford might place better than Duke/Penn CAS but you are much better off at the latter two than at UChicago for management consulting. Life is all about maximizing your opportunities to create the best possible return.</p>
<p>Can it be argued that the UChicago student body is less interested in this field than students from its peer schools? And since interviews are a big part of the process, is it possible that the typically more introverted student body didn’t fare as well as students from its peer schools? In other words, it can be argued that student A will have the same opportunity to enter consulting coming out of Uchicago or Duke, it’s just that the overall Chicago student body is geared less towards consulting, resulting in a smaller number of them at these firms.</p>
<p>“Life is all about maximizing your opportunities to create the best possible return.”</p>
<p>This is definitely a statement that sounds like a Duke grad!</p>
<p>In any case, I think you’re mistaking school quality with student quality and interest. Bain and McKinsey recruit at both Harvard and Duke, every year. Why is it so many Harvard grads get offers than Duke grads? Is it just because Harvard “places better”?</p>
<p>Just as you argue that a Duke grad is “better off” than a UChicago grad for management consulting, why do you think a Harvard grad is better off than a Duke grad for this same industry?</p>
<p>I have to agree with goldenboy here. </p>
<p>Core schools are the target schools for the firms because thats where they’ve had the most success in recruiting and getting quality people for summers and full time. Its also the schools where a lot of the people who are hiring went to school. This is why a school like UT Austin is considered a target school for the firms when other more elite schools aren’t. Kids from UT are big into consulting but have less success in ibanking (in NYC but not in Houston). When firms hire from OCR, they already have a predetermined number of people they aim to take from each school. So for example, they want more Harvard kids than Duke kids and more than UChicago ones. </p>
<p>No OCR = very slim chance of getting a job there unless you’ve done some networking and built up some connections</p>
<p>Trapezius,</p>
<p>That only works to a student’s detriment if the quotas from all of the firms does not match the demand at a particular school, correct? I’d still think, for example, that if a student wants to go into consulting, and is a good fit for the school, it makes more sense to go to, say, Williams than UT Austin, even if UT Austin has a larger array of employers at OCR. </p>
<p>This is because the demand from Williams students - ostensibly - relatively matches the interest of firms in Williams students. So, Williams students aren’t adversely affected because most firms don’t conduct OCR there. </p>
<p>On a related note, then, we still need data to see if interest in consulting at UChicago is surging, and is met with flat interest from employers. All the recent anecdotes we have, though, illustrates that UChicago students are quite happy with their exit options, and mgmt. consulting may simply not be as sought after as it is at other schools. </p>
<p>Further, I’d be most interested to track changes over time. It’s clear that, in my day at least, interest in mgmt consulting was low. More students want to be poets or comparative lit scholars than employees at Bain. I’d like to see data on how (or if) this is changing. I’m unconvinced that all these UChicago students are getting shut out simply because they didn’t go to Northwestern or Duke.</p>
<p>
Harvard is the #1 target school for MBB Management Consulting because it is believed to have the highest concentration of Type A personalities among American schools and it has the largest alumni network in this field so there will be dozens of grads at each consulting firm vouching for Harvard graduates.</p>
<p>A Harvard Grad is better off than a Duke Grad since there are more firms conducting OCR and they aim to take more kids from the former than the latter. Once you move down the ladder of consulting firms though, places like Accenture and Deloitte aim to hire more Duke grads since they actually believe that most Harvard alums wouldn’t accept job offers there since they have better options on the table.</p>
<p>
This is absolutely spot on. These MCs have been hiring dozens of Harvard grads annually since their existence and most of the Directors and Managing Principals bleed Crimson. Why would they shift the system to hire more Wash U or U Chicago graduates when the recruiting system they have in place in the status quo already works so efficiently?</p>
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<p>Yup, no need to fix something that ain’t broken…</p>
<p>Only time will tell whether UofC can rise through the ranks. @OP: it would help if we knew what other college choices you have, but if you are optimistic about UofC’s future, then come here.</p>
<p>I’m also considering Columbia and Penn</p>
<p>How about financial aid/merit?</p>
<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/university-chicago/583066-uchicago-vs-upenn-vs-columbia.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/university-chicago/583066-uchicago-vs-upenn-vs-columbia.html</a></p>
<p>If non-Wharton Penn, then I would cross Penn off the list since you’d be competing with Wharton kids for those spots. Not that Penn kids can’t get those spots, but it just makes things so much harder…no need for that. At Columbia/UofC at least you’d be on equal ground with everyone else and wouldn’t enter with a “disadvantage”. Also, Penn is more pre-professional so you’d have more kids who are gung-ho about IB/consulting. Not so much at UofC (just yet) (and I don’t know about Columbia) so going to UofC your competition would not be as great. </p>
<p>Hopefully that helps eliminate one of your choices…</p>