<p>Would you say the same for all of the other schools named in the previous post (SJSU, UCSC, etc.)?</p>
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<p>If your goal is some school-prestige-conscious line of work, then, yes, a high prestige (in general) school is helpful. But if you want to work in engineering or CS, the school’s overall prestige matters less than the school’s prestige in engineering or CS and the school’s proximity to employers – and even those are factors that decline significantly for experienced people (as opposed to students in school looking for internships and first jobs after graduation).</p>
<p>If you are close to Penn, would it be correct to guess that schools like Penn State, Drexel, Rutgers, Maryland, and Virginia Tech are well represented as well?</p>
<p>I think I remember from a previous thread that you work on RF technology, and on the more E&M instead of circuit side of things. Is this correct? For positions in this area, does your company recruit from the same list of schools that you mentioned, or does it prefer to recruit from a different list?</p>
<p>I work for a defense contractor that caters to the No Such Agency. In my town of Annapolis Junction, MD the following companies having buildings next to each other:</p>
<p>Northrop Grumman
CSC (Computer Science Corp)
General Dynamics
Booz Allen & Hamilton
Boeing</p>
<p>The alumni plates consist of…</p>
<p>Univ of Maryland - College Park
Univ of Maryland - Baltimore County
Univ of Maryland - Eastern Shore (predominantly african-american college)
Towson Univ (local MD school)
Howard University (predominantly african-american college)
Virginia Tech
Univ of Virginia
Penn State
Pitt
NYU
Univ of North Carolina - Chapel Hill
Univ of North Carolina - Charlotte
Univ of North Carolina - Asheville
Rutgers</p>
<p>From what I could see. Now for my project team, the breakdown is…</p>
<p>Penn State (Program Manager)
Michigan State/Univ of Wisconsin (Me…chief engineer/data architect)
Univ of Maryland/John Hopkins (Technical Program Manager)
Univ of Maryland (3 developers)
Norfolk State Univ (developer lead…predominantly african-american college)
Towson Univ (developer)
Villanova Univ (Configuration Manager)
Univ California - San Diego (developer lead)
West Virginia University (information assurance lead)</p>
<p>I forget the schools of our Linux person and finance person.</p>
<p>Now granted for the type of work we do and who we support, the first qualification is a Top Secret/SCI & Polygraph security clearance but still, there is a wide variety of schools just in just small geographical area.</p>
<p>You being a business guy, I don’t expect you to know this, but most people who major in engineering are not looking to get into investment banking or management consulting or anything that borderline requires an Ivy League or comparably clouted degree. This is the engineering forum. In an engineering company, with few exceptions, the reputation of the school in your area of expertise will count as much as or more than the reputation of the overall school. No one at Northrop (for example) is going to care that your school has a good Law program and a good History department and an excellent business school, they are going care that your school prepared you well to be a good engineer and that you have the personality traits that make a good engineer.</p>
<p>In general, the only two Ivy league schools that compete with the top state (and private) engineering schools in engineering are Princeton and Cornell. As for the rest of the Ivies, it is no contest in engineering. Computer science is only slightly less biased.</p>
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<p>If you reread my original post, I did mention that for certain career paths that are open to engineers, an Ivy would help. I made sure to make that caveat. The important point is that the Ivy brand isn’t going to help you in engineering. If your goal is investment banking or management consulting, I would argue that those no longer qualify as engineering even if your degree says you are an engineer.</p>
<p>Just as an example, Cornell may be well-represented in industry, but it isn’t because the school is Cornell and is an Ivy, it is because the engineering college at Cornell is superb and can compete with those from Georgia Tech or Illinois or Michigan. That is the point I am making. In an engineering field, just having the Ivy tag attached to your degree doesn’t do anything for you. What does do you a world of good is a solid technical background from an engineering school that is either (a) nationally renowned for engineering, (b) known to the employer to produce quality engineers for their company or (c) is regional to that employer and produces quality engineers. You need to be technically competent, able to work as a team and have the ability to work without the guidance of a taskmaster.</p>
<p>I don’t think that’s true. I’ve never seen a student turn down an MBB consulting or BB position to work in a traditional engineering role. This gets back to a previous statement:</p>
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<p>Why do Ivy League kids ask for so much money and tend to not stay in traditional engineering? Because they have other options making more money with and having more impact in the world than traditional engineering. Why companies that go to Penn State have more success in hiring engineering students? Because the Penn State students don’t have those high-salary / high-impact options available to them. So traditional engineering employers like Penn State.</p>
<p>That’s a critical difference. So if you’re planning out your career path in high school, where should you go: the place where people aspire to traditional engineering or the place where you can do traditional engineering but most people find something better?</p>
<p>BanjoHitter, that is because the vast majority of engineering students aren’t applying to jobs at MBB. Only the ones who actually wan a job there are applying, so it stands to reason that the ones who apply consider that route to be their number 1 choice. That is still only a tiny fraction of engineering students though.</p>
<p>Because it’s not available to the vast majority of engineering students outside of a few highly recruited schools. At those few highly recruited schools, you see it as an employer of first choice.</p>
<p>But regardless, the point stands. Why is better: a college where the best possible career is X or a college where the safety is X and there are many potentially better careers still available.</p>
<p>So are you saying that if it was offered everywhere, then everyone would want to do it? I highly doubt that if that is your claim. Most people don’t get into engineering thinking “I hope I can do investment banking.” It isn’t merely coincidence that the Ivies and select top engineering schools have a higher proportion of students shooting for that. These students know that ahead of time and go to those schools because that is their goal. People going to the other schools aren’t going there to get into investment banking or management consulting only to then find out they don’t have a shot. They go there thinking they will be an engineer.</p>
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<p>When 90% of the students in an engineering discipline nationwide are shooting for career X, then I don’t see how they are any different. The college where X is the safety only affects that small percentage who aren’t gunning for X from the start. Also factor in that unless you go to Princeton or Cornell, going to an Ivy for engineering can not only get you into “better” careers than X, but will also hinder your chances at X because not many companies want to hire someone who is really gunning for a different job and is just going to cut and run at the earliest convenience.</p>
<p>Very few engineering students go to college thinking “I want to do XXX”. They go for a major that sounds like a fit and then figure out what the major is about while there. Top school students are no different.</p>
<p>The difference is that students at top schools are given the options of:
$60,000/year to start with a 5,000 bonus and chance for promotion after 10 years working to design one small component of a very large project
$100,000/year to start with a $20,000 bonus and a chance for promotion after 2 years to advise the COO of a Fortune 100 company on where the future of their industry should go. Oh, and we’ll throw in a virtually guaranteed admission to Harvard/Stanford/Wharton and fully pay for it. And when you come back from your MBA, it’s 6 years to partner and a million dollar salary.</p>
<p>Not to say that one is better than the other, but every student I’ve seen given that option jumps at the second choice, regardless of school. The difference is that at a very top school, you have a good chance at making that second choice a reality. At a non-top school, you probably don’t even know it exists because the chance of making it happen is so low.</p>
<p>So, again, the type of school you attend does have a major impact on your career options.</p>
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<p>Two problems: (1) you’re assuming people choose colleges based on ultimate career paths. The fact is that most people go to college for a major then determine a career path based on their experiences and what options are available. (2) You’re assuming that the 90% of engineering students “shooting” for career X do it despite the other options, not because it is their only real option.</p>
<p>At the end of the day, traditional engineering positions are not the target of engineering students. Less than 25% of engineers stay in engineering after 10 years. More than half of engineers go to management (some technical, some non-technical).</p>
<p>I’m not a finance guy or even remotely interested in becoming one, but I kind of doubt that every finance guy out there has opportunities to make huge decisions like that 2 years out of school. If I were a COO, I’d be a little wary of getting advice from a guy two years out of school.</p>
<p>At the top firms, you’re giving advice to CFO’s two months out of school. It seems odd but that’s how the firms work. CFO’s trust you because of your firm’s reputation and because your initial recommendations are filtered through a few experts before you get to make it.</p>
<p>Ever wonder how there were 30 year old executives and 35 year old CEOs? You get in a position to make high-impact suggestions by joining a top firm, make a few correct calls, then get yourself hired as an executive.</p>
<p>You don’t know anyone who’s ever done that? Probably not unless you went to a very top school. Then you’ll know your college fraternity brother who is now the CEO of some software company at age 32. Maybe he’ll remembers how great of a coder you were and he’ll hire you to be his new director of programming.</p>
<p>This is the world you don’t see if you go to a lower tier school. You figure the education is about the same, so you go to work as a programmer oblivious to the other opportunities. Then after 20 years of hard work you finally get to meet the CEO of your company who is ten years younger than you and making 10 times your salary. Then you wonder how that could have happened.</p>
<p>“* $100,000/year to start with a $20,000 bonus and a chance for promotion after 2 years to advise the COO of a Fortune 100 company on where the future of their industry should go. Oh, and we’ll throw in a virtually guaranteed admission to Harvard/Stanford/Wharton and fully pay for it. And when you come back from your MBA, it’s 6 years to partner and a million dollar salary.”</p>
<p>haha what ********… first off, I think you’re thinking about being a md and not a partner. second, the chances of that happening so quick are very very small and it would be an exception and definitely not the rule.</p>
<p>Guaranteed admission to H/S/W is also ******** seeing as they are steering away from people in finance and going towards more nontraditional applicants… it was never really virtually guaranteed anyways.</p>
<p>ROFL. Banjo has dreamed up a fantasy world. How adorable. Perhaps he just thinks he sounds cool to the high school kids. Yeah. What a bad ass, living in a high stakes world and being so important.</p>
<p>A while ago he was harping on about how students who attend Georgia Tech have the doors opened to this financial/tech elite that us ordinary people are not even aware of. Because a GaTech degree is just so impressive.</p>
<p>The guy’s definitely prone to fantasy and hyperbole.</p>
<p>I never said that I had those options fresh out of school, or that I’m even involved in them. Ad hominem if you want, but it’s pointless.</p>
<p>If you want to pretend that we live in a world where everyone gets the same opportunities and where “working your hardest” gets you to the top, then believe that. But I think we all know that’s the real fantasy land. Certain people get farther than others with less work. If might be in your best interest to figure out why before writing it off.</p>
<p>Having CEO’s in their 30’s DO HAPPEN in the world of IB. There is no denying that. It’s the AMOUNT of events that NEED to happen in order to get to that level is what potential students need to know. There are some high-school students with very high GPA’s today who have no shot at that path just because of the high school they attended or their SAT’s/ACT’s were not high enough to get into the “target” schools (read: Ivy and a few others like Stanford, GaTech and CMU).</p>
<p>Even AFTER doing the 100 qualifiers within your 4-year college degree and somehow networking enough to parlay into some IB firm, you then have to be just about the best at the firm also. Now that is a lot of dedication (and long hours) for someone in their 20’s. It can pay off but boy are there risks.</p>
<p>I’m not trying to be a debbie downer. Your life isn’t ruined because you can’t get into a top school. But you will not have the same advantages as someone who does. And that’s something that should not be downplayed when making a college choice.</p>
<p>Is that fair? Maybe not. But life isn’t always fair. Otherwise we wouldn’t have people born into privileged and others poor. Why should Chelsea Clinton or the Bush twins have an advantage just because they were born into the right family? It’s unfair, but it’s reality. You can complain about it or you can accept it and do your best to adapt. This isn’t the world where 9th place gets a participation trophy.</p>
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<p>Nope. In management consulting well more than 1-in-8 making it to partner. And those that don’t leave to very high positions in industry placed their by the partners who want to see them succeed (and later hire them for consulting services). It’s also not that difficult to get a job if you go to the right school.</p>
<p>I know it can be hard to stomach that opportunities are available to some but not others, but it’s these realities that people need to know when making important decisions. I didn’t and made the wrong decision because of it.</p>