Nor,
I think the reason I am conceding all, or most, of the investment banking jobs to the Ivy grads and equivalent is because, to the best of my knowledge, there are only a few investment banking “houses” out there and yes they do seem to be focused on NY, London, Abu Dhabi, etc., but I could be wrong. I think they might have branch offices to network out when they need to find investors for the securities they sell on behalf of clients but the only thing they are doing at branch offices is sell side stuff not the heavy analysis or trading. I could be wrong.
They take the best of the best because they can.
So, when someone goes to a public U. they usually forgo any real shot at IB’ing although there are exceptions. One of my former students (i teach basic level accounting at a CC) kept in touch with me because he needed references for things like grad school. He started at the CC I work at but he was not your typical 18 YO. For one thing, he wore wing tip type shoes and office dress slacks to class. He was the top 1% academically, not just on how he dressed, but everything he did and he ended up at UF as a finance major and he did get an internship at some big name power firm on Wall Street.
He considered Penn and other places but ended up at UF and he does not regret it. He will make it. He is the diamond in the rough that people will groom and pull along to amazing heights. Hard work will pay off for that young man. He has greatness written all over him. His EC’s at the CC included being president of PTK and so forth. He learning basic accounting in my classes but he fully understood everything he needed to know about GAAP, SEC regs, financial reporting, etc. at our level and you could tell he was assimilating all of that with what he was learning in other disciplines, like Fin and Econ, and other stuff he was reading. A normal student can’t or doesn’t do that.
He is the exception to the rule though.
You might be right about the who you know is better than what you know stuff. But that sounds like rolling the dice and hoping for a 3 and a 4. The sports industry is huge and, from what I can tell, full of jobs, some of which are lucrative and good and many that are not. It is a rich man’s game. People like Jerry Jones buy sports franchises and they play with them like toys. Peter Pan Syndrome. College athletics admin is full of jobs too and some of them seem very appealing although I’ll bet lots of them, in academic support, boil down to “helping” the jocks write their papers which sounds like glorified tutoring to me. Of course, if they steer the jocks to the bozo degrees there will be far less papers, cough cough, to write.
It is really difficult giving a 19 year old advice about careers and such. I am relate very well to your comment that you still don’t know what you want to do :-). Believe me. So how I am supposed to give advice to anyone else? I base my advice on what I experiences and learned and what I hear from others. I’ve been on dozens of interview committees and such and I stay tuned into my discipline area and my career field as well. One thing that stands out, over and over, is having technical knowledge and skills sets is all fine and dandy but lots of people have those. Those skills are considered the minimum requirements just to get an interview for a real job. What sets people apart are the ones who have employable skills AND combine it all with exceptional people, leadership and teamwork skills. When you see someone at an interview who has all the requisite academic and experience you want and then you see that they did all kinds of real leadership and EC stuff and they impress you at the interview with how real and relatable they are … those are the people that you pound the table for. Also, quality people never seem to stay down for long. They find ways to reinvent themselves, grow, create new opportunities, etc.
