<p>Hey guys, congratulations to all of you who were accepted. For those of you who were not, it's not nearly the end of the world. College is about what you do, not where you are. </p>
<p>I'm happy to answer any questions you may have about Princeton. I've been here a while and can answer some very specific questions if need be. Fire away =).</p>
<p>that’s a very nice sentiment, but we won’t know for another couple of weeks who got in and who didn’t.</p>
<p>It would nice if you can answer this. Why should a student interested in majoring in economics to pursue a career in Wall Street choose Princeton over say Harvard, Yale, or Wharton? What differentiates the opportunities such as ECs, Classes, and Job Placement available at Princeton over those colleges? How is the campus at Princeton different from those colleges? Thanks.</p>
<p>I have the same questions as AY8888 and I would like to add: What makes Princeton for Government/Political Science better than Harvard and Yale?
Also: What about study abroad opportunities at Princeton? Can you tell me something about that, maybe even some personal experiences? Thanks for your help!</p>
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<p>You will gain no career specific benefit from choosing any one of those over the other. Each is a target school for recruiting, and each is seen as equally prestigious. You can rest assured that Princeton has an extremely strong program in finance, so if that is what you’d like to study you’ll get the best education possible. Nevertheless, I’m sure that Harvard, Yale, and Wharton offer equally strong programs. You should make your choice based on other factors (location, campus setting, social environment, housing, etc.).</p>
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<p>Again, none of Harvard, Yale, or Princeton offer an academically superior program in political science; you’ll have just as an enriching experience at one as at any of the others. At each school you’ll find amazing professors who enjoy teaching undergraduates as well as nasty ones who would rather not. As a personal anecdote, the professor of a 400-level seminar on American foreign policy allowed me to enroll this past semester (I’m a freshman). It was a six person class and was the most interesting and enjoyable course I’ve ever taken. In fact, I got to know the professor quite well and now we have lunch together every few weeks.</p>
<p>This is not, of course, only going to happen at Princeton; but should you choose to come here, you will not be let down academically.</p>
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It would nice if you can answer this. Why should a student interested in majoring in economics to pursue a career in Wall Street choose Princeton over say Harvard, Yale, or Wharton? What differentiates the opportunities such as ECs, Classes, and Job Placement available at Princeton over those colleges? How is the campus at Princeton different from those colleges? Thanks.
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<p>In economics, all of HYP are extremely strong, and very prominent. Lots of recruiting, etc. I think Harvard and Princeton are regarded as a smidge stronger in economics, and specifically finance, than Yale is, but it’s such a small difference as to be basically negligible.</p>
<p>As for specifically finance (wall street IBanking etc.), Princeton has both the finance certificiate program, as well as ORFE (Operations Research and Financial Engineering). So if you’re really interested in finance in a sense other than “I want to make lots of money”, Princeton provides some relatively unique opportunities for actual academic study of the discipline. ORFE is what I’m probably going to major in, and I found it to be a pretty unique major to Princeton, and also pretty interesting.</p>
<p>In terms of ECs, classes and job placements not a whole lot wil differ between the 3. Some classes will have no analogues at the other colleges, but overall it’s pretty similar.</p>
<p>As for campus, Princeton’s campus is rural(ish), and more contiguous than either Harvard or (especially) Yale. I personally liked it much more tthan either of those schools, but your mileage may vary.</p>
<p>how hard would you say pton is(what are u majoring in too)? as in how much time does the work leave you to participate in the things you’re interested in?<br>
What do you think of having exams after winter break? like it or hate it? does it add stress to your break?</p>
<p>Princeton is tough. We just got done with midterm week, and I averaged around 4 hours of sleep a night for 10 days straight. Not fun. The Princeton experience can be divided roughly into four categories: academics, EC’s, social life, and sleep. It’s pretty much impossible to devote adequate time to all four, and I find three challenging enough. That being said, I’m having the best time of my life–professors are great, and my friends are some of the most interesting people I’ve ever met. I don’t really mind having exams after break. We would have to start earlier and shorten reading period if we changed the schedule, and I don’t think that’s a good idea. For the record, I’m a freshman planning to major in math.</p>
<p>Hey guys! My Princeton interviewer seemed to be saying that one could take “as many concentrations as one whishes to”. Realistically speaking, though, is it feasable to concentrate in more than one area?</p>
<p>Thanks!</p>
<p>You can only major in one field. You’ll write your thesis and two junior papers in this field. If you want to minor in other fields, you’ll (typically) either have to incorporate the area of the minor into one of those three pieces of independent work or do additional independent work (the equivalent of another junior paper).</p>
<p>So, for instance, I plan on majoring in philosophy and minoring in finance. Because finance doesn’t lend itself to the topics in philosophy I’d like to write about, I’m going to do a separate piece of independent work in finance. So, in effect, I’ll end up writing three junior papers and one thesis.</p>
<p>How feasible it is to ‘concentrate’ in many areas is therefore contingent on (a) how close the areas are and (b) how much independent work you are willing to do. In general, though, there isn’t much of a need to officially study so many areas. If you stick with your core areas of interest and simply take classes in the others, you’ll be fine.</p>
<p>That sounds great - thanks a lot!</p>
<p>Why doesn’t Princeton have a statistics department?</p>
<p>princeton really hates creating new departments. For political reasons there was not a statistics department originally created. However, much of the ORFE department is statistics, and there are many stats classes in other departments. John Storey, one of the biggest names in biostatistics, was just recruited to the lewis-sigler institute.</p>
<p>Actually, according to *A Princeton Companion<a href=“written%20in%201978”>/i</a>, [a</a> Department of Statistics](<a href=“http://72.14.205.104/search?q=cache:QUZzSQjowG0J:etcweb.princeton.edu/CampusWWW/Companion/statistics.html]a”>http://72.14.205.104/search?q=cache:QUZzSQjowG0J:etcweb.princeton.edu/CampusWWW/Companion/statistics.html) was created in 1966 and survived at least until 1978. I assume that between then and now it gradually faded and was eventually incorporated into other departments.</p>
<p>Furthermore, it is simply untrue that Princeton is unwilling to create new departments. ORFE itself was [formed</a> in 1999](<a href=“http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/archives/2003/09/23/news/8578.shtml]formed”>http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/archives/2003/09/23/news/8578.shtml).</p>
<p>That said, ec1234 is correct that much of what you would normally find in a statistics program is available distributed across many departments (especially ORFE). There are some graduate statistics courses that might not be taught at Princeton, but all of the important stuff is there (particularly, again, as it relates to finance).</p>
<p>Hey GR Elton, according to the career survey of Princeton, the average salary for philosophy seems to be relatively high, which was quite surprising for me. Since you plan on majoring in philosophy, what are the career opportunities for philosophy majors like?</p>
<p>“It would nice if you can answer this. Why should a student interested in majoring in economics to pursue a career in Wall Street choose Princeton over say Harvard, Yale, or Wharton? What differentiates the opportunities such as ECs, Classes, and Job Placement available at Princeton over those colleges? How is the campus at Princeton different from those colleges? Thanks.”</p>
<p>First of all, I’m an econ major interested in Wall Street, so this topic is near and dear to my heart lol.</p>
<p>I believe that in terms of prestige, Harvard, Yale, and Princeton are all viewed very similarly, and from a career point of view, the name of the degree would offer close to zero additional benefit.</p>
<p>I considered Wharton very seriously and have visited many times, and I believe that Wharton offers no edge career wise when compared to HYP. Even more, though it is on an equal level to HYP for a few jobs (investment banking, consulting), the network at HYP is larger, better, and more diverse.</p>
<p>Economics classes at Princeton are taught at a very high level, but there are incredibly famous professors at each of HYP. I think classes taught at Wharton are not taken as seriously, nor are they as substantial. </p>
<p>EC wise, I don’t know about H and Y, but Wharton has some awesome extracurricular opportunities, people are doing tons of things. While Wharton’s ECs are much more business oriented, there are awesome business groups on every campus you mentioned. At Princeton, Business Today is a phenomenal organization and arguably the best student run organization in the country - check out their website.</p>
<p>In general, employers (and professional graduate schools) do not care about what you majored in at Princeton, just what your GPA is. They consider your intellectual talents to be what is important, not what subject-specific information you studied.</p>
<p>Philosophy majors are a highly self-selective group; that is, those who choose to major in it are generally among the more intellectually strong and engaged students. Thus, when it comes to getting a job, those who want to work outside of academia are highly sought after by virtue of their intelligence.</p>
<p>Now, I ought to amend that by noting that you can’t <em>only</em> take courses in philosophy and expect to jump into any career you’d like. For finance, which I’m the most knowledgeable about, it is very helpful to supplement the study of philosophy with courses in financial economics and mathematics. In fact, personally, I plan on taking about 1/2 of my actual coursework in finance-related classes.</p>
<p>Nevertheless, what is important is that you can major in philosophy and then go into any field you want (except certain quantitative hedge funds), provided you have a sufficient degree of preparation in that other area (which doesn’t have to be too much – my case is unusual). This is true of any concentration at Princeton.</p>
<p>So, if you love philosophy, you can take it and then go into whatever career field you’d like. But it will neither help nor hurt your future prospects in comparison to other majors; it is just one of those fields that tends to attract the highly intelligent.</p>
<p>Can maybe someone comment on the “Certificate Programs”? How exactly do they work, do they appear on the transcript, how is the workload of a certificate program compared to a major? And, how many certificate programs can one participate in? (so that there is some time left for ECs etc.) Thanks!</p>
<p>That’s really nice about philosophy major!
So if I, say, plan on majoring in philosophy, but I also have interests in physics, theoretically, I could continue on a career field in physics if I minor in physics or take sufficient amount of classes in it?</p>
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<p>I’m pretty sure they appear on your transcript (and you can certainly let employers or graduate schools know what they are). The course-load varies, from simple ones that require only a few courses to intense ones (like finance, say) that require quite a number of courses. But every one is less intense than any major.</p>
<p>Really, the hardest part is the independent work, which I noted above:
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<p>Thus, the number of certificates you can ultimate obtain is contingent upon both their proximity to your major (and each other) and how much independent work you are willing to shoulder. It can be easy to take even three certificates if they all revolve around your major; taking even two can be quite a burden if each is in a disparate field from your major.</p>
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<p>Yes, but there are two caveats if you plan on going to graduate school in physics:</p>
<p>(1) The physics and math coursework you’ll have to take in addition to philosophy will probably be so extensive as to severely limit the number of electives you can take in other areas. That is, you’ll probably spend the vast majority of your class slots on philosophy, math, and physics – to the exclusion of other areas.</p>
<p>(2) You’ll also probably want to undertake independent research in physics, which will be a significant additional burden. [Edit: I suppose you could combine your interests and write a junior paper on the philosophy of physics (Hans Halvorson is awesome in this area), but on the other hand that might not work if you’re not into the more foundational areas like quantum mechanics.]</p>
<p>So yes, if you really want to major in philosophy and also receive a strong preparation in physics, you can do so. But it will definitely limit what else you can do.</p>