<p>I don’t believe that the ibanking ship has sailed at all. </p>
<p>Fun little anecdote: I went into the city a few weekends ago to have a mini high school reunion with some friends that I had not seen in a while. Every single one of them are in finance/consulting and not a single one is making less than 6 figures all-in comp out of UG.</p>
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<p>At this point in time I have no clue. It could anywhere from entrepreneurship (already started one company with $25,000 in rev/year and contemplating starting another one), technology, or possibly investment banking/strategic consulting. I could very well end up in investment banking and if I do it won’t be for the long haul it will just because there was no good alternative option when I graduated. However, I couldn’t see myself doing that for more than a few years.</p>
<p>Back to my original analogy. Just because the ship has sailed it doesn’t mean the ship is in a storm. The ship could very well be idling along.</p>
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<p>By the ship has sailed I meant the golden days of investment banking are over. Eventually, I see compensation leveling out with doctors and lawyers, like they once were three decades ago.</p>
<p>My daughter is working 7-12 most weekdays, but has most weekends free. She is re-evaluating her life at this point. She will be getting her first real bonus this year (based on performance), and if they don’t hit her bogey they maybe looking for another analyst.</p>
<p>There maybe a lot of people who want to get into the business, but there are very few who are very good. I have worked with a lot of them, objectively I will say that D1 is as good as they come. She has taken on a lot of associate level responsibility as a first year analyst. In order for them to do deals, they need good analysts to support them. Relatively, those analysts are cheap. We will see if her MD is smart or not.</p>
<p>What sometimes seems to happen is that certain schools do a better job of publicizing internships, and perhaps helping students submit quality applications to them. Often, but not always, these are top schools. D found out about an opportunity through her own online research, but 4 out of the 20 total interns there are from one school (It’s not HYPSM or another Ivy, nor Wiliams or Amherst, and nor is it a school located in same city as the internship.) D thinks the students were sent info. about if from their career office. Similarly, in her other internship, which she also found on her own, several students learned of the job from their career offices.</p>
<p>At my son’s school, professors receive emails directly from hiring managers for jobs, internships and coops and they usually forward these to the departmental listserver. The university has a mechanism to get them on their official career center board so that they can be searched, have contact information and a process for submitting applications but there are apparently a lot of hiring managers that don’t want to set this up.</p>
<p>Sometimes the professor will add comments about the opportunity too encouraging students to apply.</p>
<p>I suppose that a single student could get an internship at a company and they tell a number of friends about it too though it wouldn’t see as wide an audience.</p>
<p>The answer to all of these questions is obviously “It depends.” And others have ably described the it depends and some of what it depends on.</p>
<p>One thing to note. The high-end consulting firms care about the resumes for screening purposes but also to show their clients that they have the best and the brightest. </p>
<p>On I-banking, I think that the Volcker Rule and other changes emanating from the 2008 crash do mean that i-banking will not return to its zenith where revenues were very high and people didn’t care much about costs. Prop trading has to be moved out to hedge funds (good for hedge funds, bad for banks). But, hedge funds and money management firms have to pay attention to costs in a way that investment bankers probably didn’t as everything was clients’ money.</p>
<p>I think some schools have fiercely loyal alumni, who like to hire graduates from their alma mater. I’ve got no real evidence to back it up, but around here it seems like many USC alums are like that. I typically drive down the freeway in close prioximity to at least a couple cars sporting Trojan regalia. UCLA, not so much.</p>
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<p>And ironically those clients - the ones who actually make and sell stuff that brings in money that enables them to hire the high-end consulting firms and without whom those consulting firms wouldn’t exist – don’t necessarily HAVE elite-school degrees themselves. It begs the question as to whether they (the end clients) are REALLY “impressed by elite school degrees” or whether the high-end consulting industry has deluded itself into believing their clients care, and they’ve gotten wrapped up in it all. </p>
<p>And who are they kidding? If you are a client hiring a high-end consulting firm, you don’t really care that the junior grunt on the team went to Harvard or not. You just want him to crank the numbers you / your staff don’t have the time or inclination to do.</p>
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<p>Just out of curiosity, for the companies that care about GPA, what sort of GPA are they looking for? I realize it’s school/firm specific, but on the whole, are they looking for 3.0+, 3.5+, 3.8+ or 4.0?</p>
<p>If depends on the company and position of course. It really depends more on competition for that job than anything. But most of the places ive been looking are 3.5+. They will also likely take your major into account i.e. would you be more likely to hire a student with a 4.0 in English without relevant work, intern, or other EC experience or a 3.5 in a mahor designed for the type of job you’re hiring for w/ lots of experience.in the field?</p>
<p>IHS- it depends. My company cares about GPA ( a lot) but there’s not hard and fast rule. If you studied physics at MIT nobody expects to see a 5.0 (MIT has a five point scale.) If you studied Sports Management or some other “lite” major we aren’t going to bend over backwards to interview you with a 3.3.</p>
<p>Pizza- I think you are off base on consulting firms. I hired for one of the top tier firms for several years- we targeted top schools not because we thought our clients cared, but because that was the cheapest and most efficient way for us to meet our hiring goals. Yes- we could have sent teams to Montana and South Dakota to meet kids from the flagship U’s, and for sure we could have found what we needed there. But you have to evaluate the depth of the talent pool, the willingness and interest levels of the students, etc. </p>
<p>I have managed the recruiting function in a wide range of companies over the years. We are not delusional about who or why we hire. But it doesn’t make sense to increase our recruiting budget so we can brag that we hired kids from 50 different schools if we can get the job done by targeting 10 or 15 core schools. And frankly, if Swarthmore or Princeton or JHU’s admissions departments can do the first cut of the talent pool by screening for ambition, initiative, intellectual curiosity, and strong reasoning skills (both verbal and quant) it would be foolish to go out of our way NOT to take advantage of that screening.</p>
<p>We aren’t kidding anyone. But if we have longitudinal data that shows that new hires who have scored above a 750 on the SAT do better in certain analytical functions at our company than students who scored a 650, it would be delusional for us to restrict our recruiting to colleges where 750 is the tippy top of the student body… vs. colleges where there are dozens and dozens of those kids.</p>
<p>I’ve hired successfully from colleges that you probably haven’t heard of. Those kids were always outliers. It is inefficient to plan a global talent strategy around finding the lucky “diamond in the rough” at an obscure Bible college, or the one kid with super high stats who ends up at a state teachers college in the rural South who is interested in moving to Frankfurt, is fluent in German, and can pass our mathematical reasoning test.</p>
<p>That’s all. Efficiency.</p>
<p>I realize that it is unlikely to be recruited from obscure schools, but does that mean that you can’t apply for a job?</p>
<p>I’m interning in DC this summer, and was surprised to find that most students sharing intern housing with me were from more obsolete colleges or state schools. Including those working in the senate, NPR, cancer institutes, etc.</p>
<p>How am I off base? I explicitly stated earlier in the thread that the reasons that firms recruit at certain high-end schools is not because they are making some grand statement that only those kids at those schools are smart enough, but because you can’t interview everywhere, and if you can identify 5, 10, 15, whatever schools that have a good track record, it’s the most efficient means of doing it versus scouring the country and trying to find the diamond in the rough elsewhere. I agree with you completely on this count. </p>
<p>It’s an efficiency play - not some kind of moral judgment that “only” these schools could ever produce smart kids. That’s what the hs seniors and college freshmen on CC never seem to understand - they take elite firm A coming to recruit at elite school B as some kind of grand statement that the powers that be bow down at the feet of anyone from elite school B and sneer at people from other schools.</p>
<p>off base in your claim that elite consulting firms think that clients care about the elite schools where new hires come from. You can love or hate Harvard; the fact remains that if you want to hire a bunch of eager, hard-working, high stats kids who know how to burn the midnight oil and won’t go home until the job is done, you are shooting fish in a barrel if you recruit at Harvard. I’m sure there are dozens of kids just like this at every flagship U in the country- it’s just easier not to make a mistake if another set of eyes (i.e. Harvard’s admissions team, the various professors who have given this student an A or a B in the last four years, etc.) have validated the person’s ability to put nose to grindstone.</p>
<p>The fact that we ended up with a bunch of graduates from elite schools is the by product, not some “oh wow, we think our clients care how many Harvard grads we hired”. You implied that we were mindless dopes bowing to the gods of prestige because consulting clients cared. That’s where we disagree.</p>
<p>CEKelly, you can get hired anywhere. But it pays to learn as much as you can about what different companies are looking for before you randomly shoot off emails and copies of your resume. In my current job we get hundreds of resumes a year from freshman and sophomores asking for unpaid internships- we do not hire anyone who we do not pay. We do not hire freshman and sophomores. This is all clearly spelled out on our recruiting website. Since we assume some reading comprehension skill from our applicants, don’t apply without reading the information which is clearly spelled out.</p>
<p>We do not have an office in Boca, so don’t put that location down as your preferred location.</p>
<p>Otherwise, we try to read every single resume with an open mind. We don’t like typos but have become very generous re: homonyms because of spellcheck.</p>
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<p>USC is like Penn State. Football rules.
One can see Trojan flags fluttering in many housing subdivision in So CA. every Saturday.
Will this lead to an advantage in employment, it’s questionable.</p>
<p>As I said I have no actual data about USC. Of course that never seems to stop anonymous people from posting tons of anecdotal data. The USC alums I know, and their numbers are legion, have a very strong alumni hiring network around here.</p>
<p>And I’m a UC grad, so I have personal bias, except maybe against USC.</p>
<p>USC alumni are just more vociferous, louder. In numbers, there are more UCLA alumni and all of those I know have jobs.</p>
<p>That could be I suppose. Sure doesn’t seem like it here in PV where you can’t swing a dead cat wirhout hitting a Trojan.</p>