<p>Hey everybody! I am faced with a lovely but excruciating challenge before May 1st which is choosing between cambridge to read economics in the UK, harvard, yale, princeton, stanford or Huntsman program at Upenn. I am most seriously consdering financial engineering at princeton, economics at harvard, economics at cambridge, and huntsman. I am interested in pursuing an MBA at harvard or stanford down the track and my primary career interest at the moment is investment banking/consultancy (don't judge haha I believe its one of the fastest ways to get diverse, fascinating, high-level experience and be challenged) Please help!</p>
<p>First off, congratulations! at this point, you can be sure that there isn’t really a wrong choice to make.</p>
<p>I am in a similar situation, and I find myself in the incredible position of choosing between Harvard, Yale, MIT, Stanford and Cambridge. (however, I should probably say that I’m interested in the biological sciences, and medicine at Cambridge)</p>
<p>Before wasting too much time trying to choose which school you want to go to, I think you should first recognize wether you want a focused UK education, or a liberal arts education in the US. That is probably the most important thing you need to know right now, and then you can keep narrowing down your list.</p>
<p>Personally, I’ve decided that a liberal arts education is too important to me to choose Cambridge, and I’m now considering either Harvard or Yale, with a strong leaning towards Harvard as of now because of a few professors/research going on at Harvard, location, and few other nuances.</p>
<p>Then you should consider the student life. The main reason why I’m attracted to H, and Y is the incredible Housing system they have that fosters this great sense of community within a larger one (I believe Princeton is also close in that respect.) Where do you think you’ll fit in most/be happiest at?</p>
<p>Hardest decision? C’mon! My hunch is that both of you will do very well and make the best of your circumstances wherever you end up. You can hardly go wrong with any one of your choices. Congratulations!</p>
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<p>Of course, I’m judging . . . and I’m judging that you are something of a hypocrite, too. Those fields are the “fastest” in one dimension only: how much salary you will receive. (Not how much money you make – for that you have to start your own successful business. But there won’t be someone else with an unlimited bank account writing you checks.) You will be a well-paid supernumerary, and that’s about it.</p>
<p>In any event, your opportunities to sate your greed will be about the same at all of those colleges, and all of them will probably tempt you to develop an intellectual interest in something that isn’t money. So pick the one you want.</p>
<p>Well, lets face it, all of these universities are awesome! You’ve done really well to get into any of these. Firstly, you should consider what you are most interested in studying, and then which University is the top ranked in that field. Secondly, UK and US schools are very different in the way they teach and how they teach it. US universities tend to allow a far broader curriculum than UK universities, as when you go to a UK university, you will have to declare your major right away whereas at US universities you don’t. Also, the transition from high school to university is tricky for everyone, and if you live in the US it might be easier knowing that your parents are nearer at hand, as opposed to continents away. Finally look at the student life in the universities, location, whether they are big on sport or not. Anything that you feel is important. Finally, lets just say that any of these universities will offer you a suberb education, and I don;t really think you could go too wrong choosing any of them. Congrats!</p>
<p>@JHS: There’s no justification for being this judgmental and impolite to a poster whom you do not know and about a field about which you obviously know little. If you knew anything about the central role of investment banking in the economy, you would not be so insulting to one who wishes to enter that field. A little self-control from you would not be amiss.</p>
<p>^^ ditto for consulting. </p>
<p>@JHS “your opportunities to sate your greed will be about the same at all of those colleges”.</p>
<p>I don’t even know how to respond to someone who is an adult whose posts I have generally always respected. Perhaps you could give everyone a list of respectable professions that you approve of.</p>
<p>To be clear, both consulting and investment banking are perfectly respectable professions, and I have friends whom I respect in both. My job puts me in contact with investment bankers practically daily, and once upon a time I worked in that sector, although it wasn’t structured anything like the way things are now. My wife has hired three of the top consulting firms for projects in the past six years, and is regularly offered consulting jobs. The two fields are not actually very similar at all – the only thing they have in common is that they both hire a lot of recent graduates from elite colleges to do intellectual grunt work at high wages. Very few of those kids actually wind up with careers in those fields; mostly they burn out quickly working 100-hour weeks and go on to business or law school. But they acquire some nice toys along the way.</p>
<p>I don’t know a single person who has succeeded in either field who came to college hoping to go into it. In fact, many of them gave little thought to either field until shortly before the interviews started. The top employers mainly seem to look for super-smart people who are deeply engaged in something. It doesn’t have to be economics at all, and often isn’t. (Here, on the consulting side, I’m talking about McKinsey/BCG - type management consulting firms, not the rather different, more technical work that places like Accenture perform, where people are hired more for specific skills that are more likely to be found in computer science majors than econ majors.) The young, successful investment bankers I know best include one person who was all about going to medical school until halfway through college, a physics-major/math PhD who didn’t think about finance until after he completed his dissertation, and a couple of lawyers who crossed over from estate planning to wealth management. My kids’ friends who work in consulting include a double major in history and painting and someone who picked his major on the basis of what interfered least with working on the college newspaper.</p>
<p>I am just sick of reading things that smart high school students post on CC talking about their “passion” for investment banking or consulting. It’s they who have no idea what those industries are about, other than starting salaries. I understand that they are just responding predictably to the economic signals the adult world is sending them, but I wish they cared more about accomplishments than bank accounts. I am also saddened because, as with the NBA or the NFL, there are many more students who aspire to that kind of job than will actually be able to get one.</p>
<p>Oh, and finally, “central role [of investment banking or consulting] in our economy”? Happy to debate that one. I guess it’s still factually true of investment banking, on a volume basis, but the industry seems less relevant now than it has ever been, and basically seems to have abandoned most of the functions that led to the central role it once had. And big consulting? Huh? In what way is that central to our economy?</p>
<p>If you want an MBA at Harvard, do undergrad elsewhere. I personally think the social life is best at Yale, but that’s just me.</p>
<p>Is there a field of endeavor that doesn’t ask some time/money questions of those who seek to pursue it? Consulting and financial service sector jobs readily come to mind as interesting, high paying jobs that might be available to an excellent student attending an elite university. What’s wrong with this kid considering them? Most of us can rationalize some altruistic aspect of our jobs ( praise the I Bankers and hedge fund managers who … pay a lot of taxes!) but ultimately, there is usually a selfish aspect to our chosen careers as well. I would wager that your average particle physicist, classics professor, 2nd grade teacher or nurse doesn’t add much more to the world than a person of similar personality and talents pursuing the financial/consulting fields. Bottom line: I think good people doing good things and treating others well add to the quality of life whatever job they might have. If their talents and ambition drive them towards high paying fields I have no qualm with that, possibly because that’s what I did. I’m an oncologist.</p>
<p>That may be true, but I understand where JHS is coming from. It is sad when I see that students are more concerned about getting easy As over a hard fought B+ at an elite school so that they can have a high GPA to get into that right medical school, law school, IB/consulting firm on wallstreet. Isn’t college where we send our children to learn to think critically about what is important in our lives and society? If all one cares about is using college as a “stepping stone”, without learning anything of substance such as philosophy, ethics, great literature, etc. one definitely does not need to attend this school or any of the elite private schools…they just need to go to their local state school that offers the best cheap education. After all, most law and medical schools only really care about is your GPA and LSAT/MCAT scores.</p>
<p>Starsky, thanks for your honesty and self-awareness. I know exactly what you are talking about, because I am a corporate lawyer. But at 17, I wasn’t deciding where to go to college based on where was most likely to lead to a lucrative legal career, just as I would bet anything you weren’t thinking “Where can I go that will mostly likely lead to a high-paid medical specialty?” </p>
<p>I went into the field I am in originally because I had developed an intellectual interest in corporate law when I was in law school – in part because of my experiences in the banking world. And while the ease of earning a living in that field surely affected me, it was a pretty secondary concern, since I was confident by then I could earn a living doing any number of different things.</p>
<p>It would surprise me if things were a lot different for you. I don’t think I know any oncologists who didn’t start by dreaming of curing cancer. They may have had other dreams as well, and ultimately chose to pursue the cancer one because it provided a good living, too. By the same token, I don’t blame at all the college newspaper editor who looks at the world and says, “I can get an insecure, low-paid job in journalism, if I am lucky, or I can take an interesting, well-paid job in consulting, repay my loans, and maybe figure out what I want to do with my life.”</p>
<p>But that’s not the same thing as starting out money-first. And when a high school senior says “I want to work in investment banking or consulting,” what I hear is “Money first!” And one of the things that bothers me about that is this: When I went to college, at one of the institutions americandream88 is considering, there were hardly any students who were “money first”. And the atmosphere was intellectual, exciting, wonderful. Over the past few years, though, increasingly young graduates of the same college describe it in ways that sound like the atmosphere is not so intellectual anymore, and much more focused on qualifying for the highest-paying careers. That makes me very sad. And sometimes I take it out on CC posters who seem like part of the problem. Sorry.</p>
<p>JHS, unfortunately with tuition being so incredibly high today (esp. at private universities), and with elite students being smart enough to know that graduating with huge debt is a risk to future financial security, more and more students are opting for careers that maximize ROI and do not require taking on even more education (via MBA/JD/MD). Do you know how much a private university costs if you do not receive any aid? Easily over $200k. This, along with the fact that law and medicine are not what they used to be, makes banking/consulting the one of the careers of choice for students at top universities.</p>
<p>@OP, obviously all are great choices and you should choose based on fit. I would choose the Huntsman program because of how unique it is, plus you are getting two (or three?) degrees, including one from Wharton.</p>
<p>JHS and ohmmho – I hear you both. I found this CC thing because I was trying to find some info for my HS son, but my daughter goes to “one of these schools” and, thus, I’m finding all these interesting ( and sometimes really weird) discussions. Anyway, I’m not sure what the right path is. I’m doing exactly what I wanted to do, going all the way back to grade school. I really liked school and was good at it, I liked science, it seemed kind of noble and, yes, the ones I knew seemed to be doing OK. I didn’t figure out the oncology part until later, but I was the get the best GPA MCAT guy at a, let’s say, non-elite institution. College got me where I wanted it to get me. It wasn’t until I was established in practice that I found out how much I like to read about politics, history and theology. On the other hand, my daughter, much to our consternation, has no plans. She liked model UN and debate, so Government might be her course of study, but not because she has her sights set on gov’t work. On the other hand, I have no problem with the kid like me who goes to one of these schools bound and determined to play the game to his/her advantage. They got in for some reason. Focus isn’t necessarily a bad thing. What about these Math 55 kids at H? Amazing, gifted, intellectually curious, incredibly hard working, and probably missing out on a lot of other intellectual, social and extracurricular opportunities. Still, I think it’s cool they’re at Harvard.</p>
<p>First of all, congratulations to the OP. My choice would be Stanford, as this year (according to my CC research), it is the most selective College/University in the United States. Plus, their American football team is better than the other choices that you mentioned.</p>
<p>And also thanks to JHS. Post #8 in this thread was one of the best that I have read on CC. It was clear, rational, and I learned a lot from it.</p>
<p>“my primary career interest at the moment is investment banking/consultancy”</p>
<p>Of all your options, Huntsman is the best preparation at undergraduate level. It equips you with the economics, pratical management skills (of Wharton!) language and liberal arts education you need for this career path. I have heard many a raving review from recruiters in the US and UK alike about Huntsman. Amongst employers it has an unbeatable reputation. </p>
<p>If you want to go into doing what you love straight away - this is the best way to ensure it. Recruiters love huntsman and have great links with the program. You will have individualised attention from the staff and they can help you carve out the path you need to achieve what you want. Not to mention, you will be surrounded by similarly global minded yet diverse and different people who you have the chance to live with in your first year. Its excellent preparation for your career and further education - doing an MBA at Harvard. </p>
<p>Economics at Cambridge is very theoretical and mathematical (hence the Further maths A level requirement) - if you enjoy a more theory based course I recommend this. The turtorial system will also give you alot of intensive preparation for the career you want to pursue. The other schools offer liberal arts - a great system that educates you more broadly and less specifically - but I believe if you truly truly love business and as a result want to start asap then its Huntsman. </p>
<p>Congrats, on your fab offers, you can’t really make a wrong decision. Let us know how you get on.</p>
<p>What did you pick!?</p>