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A dissenting opinion: the investment bankers I worked with in NYC were, as a group the smartest cohort I have ever been around, either before or after. I found them to be, as a group, pretty darned smart. Not all of them took higher-level calculus, but a lot of them were nevertheless mathematically apt and quick with extrapolating and conceptualizing lower-level math concepts. A lot of the people who were not math stars had outstanding verbal skills, which were probably more important. And some of the people who seemed to have neither turned out to be outstanding at making presentations, leading a group of professionals towards a goal, or getting sophisticated corporate clients to trust them.</p>
<p>The preponderance of these people were graduates of leading MBA programs, which typically require high GMAT scores to gain entry. And most of them also went to leading undergrad programs, which frequently require very high SAT scores. Then these people had to withstand a rigorous interview process, which generally required them to demonstrate their mental quickness at some point along the way. They were in fact, IMO, quite smart by most reasonable measures. Very smart.
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<p>Uh, I don't think anybody is disputing that they have to be relatively smart. They just don't have to be geniuses. </p>
<p>I'll put it to you this way. I know plenty of MIT Sloan MBA grads who got bulge bracket investment banking jobs. All of them have said to a man that they don't really feel that they are that intelligent relative to the non-Sloan graduate students at MIT. Heck, some of them even said that the Sloan MBA was, frankly, the only degree from MIT that they could have reasonably completed - that they felt they would have been absolutely crushed if they had tried to get, say, a degree in EECS from MIT. In fact, frankly speaking, the entire Sloan School is sometimes stereotyped by other departments at MIT for not being intellectually rigorous compared to the rest of MIT. I personally think that's a rather unfair characterization (as I would argue that the Sloan School is clearly more rigorous than is, say, the MIT Media Lab), but certainly the perception is there. </p>
<p>The same thing is largely true of Harvard Business School. I know many HBS students who feel that they are nowhere near as smart as many other students in other programs at Harvard. Schmoozier and better social and speaking skills, yes. But smarter? Not really. </p>
<p>I think the stats clearly bear this out. Just look at the average GPA's and standardized test scores of the top B-schools. Frankly speaking, they're not that high relative to most grad programs. For example, the highest entering GPA for a B-school was a 3.64 at HBS. Other M7 schools admit people with GPA's of 3.4-3.5, and places like Dartmouth Tuck, Michigan, and Virginia Darden are a 3.3. Similarly, the average GMAT scores of the top B-schools is around a 700 (about a 93rd percentile). Frankly, that's really not that high. Not when you consider that the top 10 law schools admit people with a 3.6-3.7 GPA and about a 169-170 LSAT (which is about 98th percentile). </p>
<p>But that's exactly what I have been saying, and you have agreed with - that you don't really have to be THAT brilliant to become an investment banker. Frankly, if you are just looking for pure intelligence, there are smarter people you can find within the same university than just the MBA students. Again, taking it back to the example of MIT, MIT is chock full of brilliant people. </p>
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For the jobs where the form of intellectual horsepower needed was largely quantitative, they did recruit the smartest quantitative minds available. Not just MIT undergrads. but their professors. Stanford PhDs, etc.
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<p>Yeah, the key word is what you just said - 'available'. In fact, I was just talking to one of these 'available' people at MIT, a PhD candidate, and he told me that, frankly, the reason why he is interviewing with the banks is simple - he doesn't think he will be highly successful in the world of academia. Science is his true love and frankly, he would prefer to just be an academic scientist. The problem is that he doesn't think he can even get a decent tenure-track position at a decent school, and even if he could, he doubts whether he can win tenure, because the truth of the matter is that hasn't published very much, what he has managed to publish has been in the lesser journals and has, frankly, not been that well regarded, and his chosen dissertation topic is not really a hot field anymore. Hence, he doesn't think he will get placed anywhere decent, and he's not willing to go to a no-name school, as he doesn't feel that he will really be able to do the kind of science he wants to do at a no-name school. </p>
<p>Hence, he is now pursuing a finance job, and picking up the MIT Financial Technology certificate basically as a consolation prize. He even called it "playing with the kids". What he's doing is "playing with the kids" - that he knows all of the stochastic mathematics, numerical analysis, and statistical theory that the computational finance guys are using. Heck, that's all old hat to him. So he's "playing with the kids". If he could get placed in a tenure-track position back at MIT, or at Harvard or Stanford or Caltech or places like that, he would jump at it. But he doesn't think he can, so he'll just go 'play with the kids'. Computational finance is obviously no walk in the park, but it's nothing compared to the kind of stuff he was dealing with in his PhD program. </p>
<p>I think that's how it is at most of these top flight technical PhD programs. The superstar students get placed as assistant profs at the top programs, and the top ones of those will get tenure. The ones who are not that superstars- they are the ones who tend to end up going to banking. I highly doubt that too many people who really complete a PhD at a place like MIT unless they truly truly love the subject. It's just too much work for you to do something that you don't really love. So anybody who can complete that degree loves the subject and would want an opportunity to pursue it as an academic. It's just that not all of them get that opportunity. For those who don't, they have to find something else to do with the rest of their lives, and that 'something else' can be finance. </p>
<p>The truth is, academics are not really motivated by money. Heck, getting a PhD is a pretty foolish venture from a financial standpoint - you can probably be better off financially by just getting a regular job. So it's quite hard to tempt academics with money. They are looking to pursue their passion. Heck, even in business school, most business school profs could probably make more money by just resigning from the faculty and starting their own consulting firm. It's not really money that they're after. You can get these guys if they can't get tenure, or in the rare cases where they get bored (like James Simons did). But the point is, I think all academics realize that they can make much more money than they are making by doing something else. Money is generally not their primary motivating factor.</p>