<p>
[quote]
After you finish your engineering major, do companies care what top schools you go to or not?</p>
<p>I know that Georgia Tech and Stanford are pretty close to each other in engineering. Since they are both so up there, does it really matter which one i go to? I have gotten into both Georgia Tech and Stanford, but i am leaning toward going to Georgia Tech. Plus it is cheaper.</p>
<p>So if i did go to stanford, would it even matter. To me since these tech schools are so up there, i would go with the cheaper one.</p>
<p>What would be the more lucrative one in the long run?
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Well, it depends on what kind of job you want. If you want to work at a large, established engineering firm, then it probably doesn't matter. </p>
<p>However, I can think of some important sectors where Stanford would help quite a bit: the first being consulting/banking. If you're planning to try to be a management consultant or an investment banker or venture capitalist, especially at one of the top firms, you should clearly choose Stanford. Those firms are highly elitist in nature. Granted, some will recruit at GTech. But many more will recruit at Stanford. </p>
<p>The second one is entrepreneurship and the tech startup environment. I think it is no secret that Silicon Valley is the most fecund sector of technology entrepreneurship in the world, bar none, and Stanford is without a doubt the engine that drives the Valley. Yet to this day, no other university has been able to replicate the entrepreneurial culture that permeates Stanford and Silicon Valley, despite repeated attempts. Not MIT, not Caltech, not Illinois, not Georgia Tech, not anybody. Heck, not even Berkeley has been able to do it, and it's only an hour away. Compare the entrepreneurial activity that happens in the East Bay to that in Silicon Valley, and there is no comparison to be made. </p>
<p>Yet the fact is, startups don't really "recruit", at least, not in the traditional sense. That's because when startups are small - which is precisely when you want to get into them - they don't have the resources to conduct nationwide recruiting searches. Hence, the founders just do the natural thing of hiring their friends (and their friends' friends, etc.). That's generally the only viable option for a startup to be able to staff up. For example, many of the original engineering team members at Google consisted of Larry and Sergey's old school pals. Many of the original employees at Yahoo were Jerry and David's old school pals. Granted, not all of them stuck through with the company to IPO, but those who did became millionaires many times over. But if they had never gone to school with those founders, then they would never have been hired for those jobs and hence they wouldn't be rich right now. </p>
<p>Similarly, another major reason why Stanford serves as such a dynamic tech entrepreneurship incubator is that the largest and most prominent cluster of venture capital firms in the world is literally just a few miles down the road. Venture capitalists strongly prefer to fund local companies because they are easier to oversee (i.e. a Silicon Valley venture capital partner who has made investments only locally can set up an impromptu meeting with any of his investments in about an hour, but not so if they have invested in firms halfway around the country). The upshot is that it is far easier to obtain funding if you are in Silicon Valley (which has prompted pundits to argue that the first thing that a tech startup should do if it is not located in Silicon Valley is to move there). Hence if your goal is to maximize your chances of joining a startup that makes it big (and much of the reason to join a startup is that you think it has a chance of making it big) it is probably better to go to Stanford. </p>
<p>The third reason has nothing to do with engineering, and inherently so. The question is - what if you switch out of engineering? Studies have shown that the majority of incoming engineering students will not actually complete the engineering major. Many of them will switch to something else. {Some will flunk out completely.} Hence, what if you go to GTech and then find out that you actually want to major in one of the humanities or social sciences? Stanford is a better humanities/soc-sci school than is GTech. </p>
<p>But like I said, if you don't really care about any of that, then you could do just fine at GTech.</p>