<p>I’m a junior from India, (i’m in an IB school) I’m interested in Economics and ive taken Economics and Math as my HL subjects </p>
<p>How is the Economics department, in terms of faculty, and faculty-student discussions? Also, how are the job placements for econ majors?</p>
<p>I'm an incoming freshman whose thinking about econ, so I have many of the same questions. I've managed to glean some info from snooping around [url=<a href="http://www.amherst.edu/%7Escrutiny/%5DScrutiny%5B/url">http://www.amherst.edu/~scrutiny/]Scrutiny[/url</a>], but I'd still like to hear the opinions of current students.</p>
<p>I'm an incoming freshman as well, but I've talked to several people that are already attending Amherst and this is what I gathered from them.</p>
<p>Amherst has a very strong Economics department. Professor Barbezat and Woglom are very good, as are most of the other profs in the department, or the school as a whole. You can check out their department page to read a little bit more about them. The discussion is as you would expect from a liberal arts college. There is a great emphasis on the student teacher relationships; from what I hear the professors definitely make themselves available when needed. Of course, Amherst also doesn't have graduate students and TAs teaching their classes. </p>
<p>As far as job placement goes, it is very strong across the board. Amherst is considered a target school for bulge bracket financial corporations (Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley etc.). The percentage of students getting jobs with these firms is very high, on par with Yale and Princeton and a tad below Wharton and Harvard. Same applies for private equity, hedge funds, run of the mill corporations, what have you.</p>
<p>If you want to pursue graduate studies, Amherst has a stellar record when it comes to sending schools to the top business schools.</p>
<p>"As far as job placement goes, it is very strong across the board. Amherst is considered a target school for bulge bracket financial corporations (Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley etc.). The percentage of students getting jobs with these firms is very high, on par with Yale and Princeton and a tad below Wharton and Harvard. Same applies for private equity, hedge funds, run of the mill corporations, what have you"</p>
<p>Does Amherst post actual numbers? Sorry Entendu, but statements like these are kind of vague, and I'd like to see the actual numbers. If you can find a link for this kind of info, I was wondering if the same information exists for graduate schools.</p>
<p>Generally speaking, these firms do not release data on the school composition of their analyst classes. The only way people really know is having the analysts themselves give a report, or on the occasion that the firms do release the data. I can tell you that as far as sheer number goes, Amherst does not place a very high number of students. But that needs to be taken in context of the relative size of Amherst, and the fact that students who choose to attend LACs are more likely to pursue graduate studies and are less pre-professional.</p>
<p>If you have access to the Amherst alumni network, you can look up the number of Amherst graduates that are currently working at some of these firms. I did a search for Goldman Sachs and found approximately 40 alumni that are currently with the firm and over 100 that have been with the firm in the past. I got about the same numbers with Morgan Stanley. There is also a significant number of Amherst alumni in senior positions (VP, MD, COO etc.). You should probably also keep in mind that the current incarnation of Amherst's website, and presumably their Alumni network, is fairly new, so there are probably a lot of alumni who have simply not updated their information.</p>
<p>This is (most likely) the school composition for Morgan Stanley's incoming analyst class this past year:
<a href="http://www.ibankingoasis.com/node/5768%5B/url%5D">http://www.ibankingoasis.com/node/5768</a></p>
<p>Ignore that first guy's ratings since he didn't adjust for school size. I did some quick math and this is the approximate ratio of students (per class) per analyst at each school.</p>
<p>Wharton-72
Harvard-111.9
Stanford-167.2
Williams-177
Princeton-193.1
Amherst-206
Claremont McKenna/Pomona-217.2
Dartmouth-255.3
Duke-258.2
Yale-332.25
Columbia-342.7
Brown-356.3
MIT-515.9
Cornell-844.7
Berkeley-978.4
UMich-1064.8</p>
<p>Numbers are approximate, and this is only off the data from one bulge bracket firm. Don't read into this too heavily, but I think you get the general idea. Aside from Wharton and Harvard (which are probably much more pre-professional), its about the same up until you get to Brown. Moral of the story is, if you want to go into finance, you won't have any trouble doing it from Amherst.</p>
<p>wow, thx for the detailed response :)</p>
<p>I had woglom last semester and he was awesome.</p>