So if I understand correctly your life goal is to work for a few companies in a narrow field. Has this goal been a constant in your life? If so why did you not check where the majority of employees from these companies graduated from before applying to college? If not who is to say that this life goal will not change again in the not so distant future?
You are very young and a little dramatic. I hope your “lesser” Ivy helps with reducing the drama. Age increases without much help.
To be honest, I didn’t think the undergrad schools at these firms were that HYPSM concentrated. From everyone I talked to before applying, a lot of them people I trust a lot, the impression I got was that all ivies offer the same opportunities; I now realize how utterly brain-dead of me it was to internalize that without doing my own research.
As for the firms themselves, I knew about most of them but have learned about a greater number in the past months.
I have had arguments made to me that getting into a top 5 school is like golden hand cuffs, and that kids thereafter take the safe options like IB or consulting and stop taking risks with their lives. The true wealth creators go to any school, have moxie, and take very large risks in life. They make their own path and make bank !
A friend of mine has a kid at Harvard and wants the kid to start a business as soon as the kid graduates. Wants to show the kid the path to making 1mm or more by the late 20s and being independent.
You should go to HYPSM if you are seriously academically inclined. Like live and breathe academics. If you want to make money, you don’t need that. In fact if you go to a place like HYPSM because you are money minded upfront, you are likely to not do well – because those places will often be filled with people that are insanely academically passionate. Also Brown and Dartmouth.
I don’t get where you got that I was academically un-inclined from the above posts. Academics have always been my bread and butter; I’m planning on doing one of the harder majors at my school and wonder if it will test me as hard as I hope.
Also, I don’t think golden handcuffs chained to MBB are the worst things that can happen to a person.
It is good if you are academically inclined. I stand corrected. Usually loyalties are always split. Kids that are very prestige conscious don’t have the bandwidth to be simultaneously very academically minded. Not that you won’t study, but that you won’t have heart in it. The stuff won’t excite you for it’s own sake. You are studying for the sake of some different purpose. Not simply because the stuff moves you.
The reason I even want to work at these types of places is that the work you do there usually demands more intellect than in other fields, at least at the higher levels. Even if it’s not traditional math or English school work, you have to be pretty sharp to succeed in any of these roles. Moreover, these firms probably have some of the highest average intelligence of any company and working with them sounds pretty sweet.
You are conflating money and intelligence :-). If they were the same thing, there wouldn’t be two different words to describe them in the English language. But let me leave this discussion. Good luck !!
If you are so miserable at your “lower Ivy” then I advise you to take a gap year. Spend some time doing something productive, mature a little bit, and apply to Harvard. If you don’t get in you can either skip college completely or attend a “lesser” school.
I have to wonder if this post is real. I have never heard of anybody sulking so much because they are going to Brown instead of Harvard, and therefore their route to prestige will be obstructed in some way.
Good luck. My daughter’s friend just left a “tippy top” financial/ investment company to go back to school. He started at an Ivy and it wasn’t a good fit, so he transferred to a “regular” small school and rocked it. Spent two years in a highly selective international gap year program and then went to work for this “tippy top” company.
He works with all types of people from all different places. They love him and are sad to see him go. Not bad considering he gave up his Ivy for a “lesser” school.
Please think this through. Normally I have more sympathy- you are a kid and I am trying- but I started writing at 5 am to get ready for work. Perhaps if I attended Harvard I would have more flexible hours.
So you spoke to people familiar with the industry, and now you think they were wrong?
Well, luckily out here in the real world, highly intelligent people get to work in many different fields and at more than a handful of Wall Street firms.
Another thing that people forget is that you likely have to finish in the top half at those schools to get the prestige jobs. By definition, half the students don’t do that. Also, a lot of them are highly connected to the prestige jobs.
Want more intellectual content? Become an intellectual property lawyer, helping your client figure out if the chemical compound a competitor developed was violating 25 different patents they own. Become a robotics engineer developing a prosthetic hand which helps veterans recapture their range of motion after their arm was blown off by a roadside bomb hidden in a cucumber patch. Become a forensic accountant figuring out where the millions of dollars various oligarchs have stolen from their own citizens are hiding. Become an art restoration expert identifying 12 layers of varnish, the chemical composition and the dates they were applied to figure out if the painting you are looking at is a genuine Botticelli or a copy made 100 years after his death. Become a transportation and logistics expert helping to retool the car-dependent grid which has developed around major airports around the world which is accelerating both congestion AND wasteful uses of fuel.
There are hundreds of careers that require more intellect than working at a hedge fund, I-bank or PE. You are taking the lazy way out by concluding that since Harvard grads congregate in a small range of industries, therefore, the best way to work with smart people is to get a job in one of those industries.
That’s not the way the real world works. There are BRILLIANT people working at the NSA, CIA, Interpol, FBI. There are BRILLIANT people working at the Smithsonian, Frick, MOCA, Louvre, Musee D’Orsay, Tate. There are BRILLIANT people working at the Cleveland Symphony, NYC Ballet, La Scala. BRILLIANT people at Fermi, Oak Ridge, and a host of top secret labs that are not known to the public.
Why have you picked ONE career path- as a high school kid- before you’ve even shown up at college to explore all these other options?
I don’t think YOU fell for the trap, I think Brown fell for YOUR trap. Harvard, Princeton, et al- these are not expensive trade schools that churn out 22 year olds ready to traipse off for their jobs on Wall Street and its off-shoots. Why on earth would you be pining away for a career you don’t even know you are interested in???
What does your HS sending anything to your college have to do with taking deferring enrollment or taking a gap year? A deferral is done between you and your college. With a gap,you, you DO decline that acceptance. And move on to applying again for the 2023-2024 year….but plan to do something very significant during that gap year.
As noted, your chances of being accepted to HYMSM are extremely small, even with picture perfect stats…because just about everyone who applies has those picture percent stats. Still 95% or more get rejected from these colleges.
The relevance of your boarding school doesn’t go away even if you attend HYPMS. Those poor non HADES kids from Choate can never find true bliss or success.
