<p>Slipper: I believe that the Tuck school of business, one of the top in the nation, is Dartmouth’s.</p>
<p>whatever happened to it doesn’t matter where you go to school, it’s what you make of it…and what you do bla bla bla</p>
<p>I agree with it. I go to the US Merchant Marine Academy. Surely not in the top 20 but my starting salary after graduation will be anywhere from 60-80k working only 6 months of the year. In addition, I will be part of an awesome alumni network where I may one day be able to get into huge maritime executive positions (if I work real hard) that pay bundles. Ever heard of Robert Kiyosaki? Yea he graduated from here…</p>
<p>It doesn’t matter where you go, its your determination, drive, and savvy that will get you where you want.</p>
<p>^ Robert Kiyosaki is a snake oil salesman.</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.johntreed.com/Kiyosaki.html[/url]”>http://www.johntreed.com/Kiyosaki.html</a></p>
<p>whatever he’s still a multi-millionaire</p>
<p>^ True… He is a good salesman.</p>
<p>I think this is a ridiculous discussion-I see just as many morons from top schools in lesser positions and CEOs from second rate schools who have real talent and personality, in fact there seems to be an inverse relationship…</p>
<p>^
Probably because those who go to second rate schools realize what they have and tend to work harder not taking things for granted. Also, there is sense of wanting to prove themselves to those who attend elite or flagship schools.</p>
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<p>It’s a fallacy to equate income with intelligence/brains. There will ALWAYS be dumber people making more money than you and smarter people making less money than you.</p>
<p>what do you meAN</p>
<p>Whoever started this threat is nuts. It is INSANE to make a statement like the title of this thread. Go to school and do the best you can. There are tons of opportunities out there. But please don’t be irrational and stupid.</p>
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<p>Personality type is hugely important – as well as your temperamental suitability to your chosen field. I worked in a consulting firm for a few years where I was simply more intelligent than 80% of the people I worked with if not 99%. (There were a lot of accountant drone types at the firm since it was associated with an accounting firm). The thing is for a lot of what the firm did the accounting drone personality was a better fit, so there were people not as smart as me who were in that context more talented than me and set up to make more money. And then there were the people as smart or smarter than me whose personalities did fit the job and they were the ones who were shooting up like rockets 'cause everyone could see they were really switched on.</p>
<p>There is absolutely, broadly speaking, a correlation between brains and income, but it’s by no means a perfect correlation. It is mediated by other questions of temperament and personality type. </p>
<p>Decoupling the correlation one more degree: there are a lot of extremely smart people who didn’t go to top 20 schools. Take for example the CEO of Hewlett Packard. He got a BBA at some relatively unknown college. He’s just damned smart and has the right temperament and broad capabilities for his job, and he has proven these things over time.</p>
<p>If the OP really thinks he or she is screwed by not going to a top 20 school, he or she could fight to get in to one and then do what some people who go to one of those do – i.e. spend his or her entire life mentioning his/her affiliation with that school as a means of trying to prove what his/her life beyond apparently doesn’t, specifically that he/she is smart. One can always tell the people who doubt their own talents or suitability for success; they so often brandish such markers of status so visibly. In the consulting firm where I worked, there was one sad sack partner who couldn’t talk to the copy machine boy let alone anyone else without throwing into the conversation that he was a partner. And there were genuinely talented partners that never needed to tell you – you either knew or suspected they were partners because they were demonstrably effective and authoritative.</p>
<p>If you don’t have the goods to get into a top 20, find out what you do have the goods for and go for it. Chances are if you have real talent, eventually you’ll run into a Harvard grad in your chosen field who can envy what you’ve accomplished.</p>
<p>And if you don’t have a talent that translates well to income, learn to be happy with what you have and can do. Because in the end happiness is what it all comes down to. If you really get to liking what you do on a day-to-day basis, you have most of the world beat.</p>
<p>Bedhead, amen to that.</p>
<p>Bedhead, I agree with one major exception. Going to a worse school will not hurt you for grad school, if anything it will help since you’ll probably have a higher gpa. However, if you want to go into finance, turning down HYPSM or Wharton is a MAJOR mistake. I’m a senior at P and sometimes I wonder if it was the right move to turn down what would have been a full scholarship at a place like NYU but when you look at your finance job opportunitiee from HYPSM or Wharton, it definitely is worth it. There are tons of firms that ONLY recruit from a handful of schools and its virtually impossible to get into them from non-target schools. It doesn’t hold true for grad school but the 3.7 from Harvard will always get the McKinsey interview over the 4.0 from Rutgers. It doesn’t even matter that the Rutgers kid might be 100x smarter than the kid from Harvard, he won’t even get a chance to show that w/o an interview. In the more competitive fields like Private Equity and Hedge funds, just try to get into a place like Bain Capital or D.E.Shaw from even a good school like UWisconsin. And just so you know I’m not making random **** up, I summered at a top firm and every single intern was either from Princeton, Yale, Harvard, Stanford, Dartmouth or Penn/Wharton (~20 summers).</p>
<p>And the entire alumni network thing is really way more important than you could imagine, I have friends who have gotten jobs just from sending out a few emails to the alum network. </p>
<p>This isn’t to say that you should always pick Yale over a full ride at UMich (since I would seriously consider the latter) but just take the whole “it doesnt matter where you go” with a grain of salt because if you want to do finance or some other things, it DOES matter…alot.</p>
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<p>Well, I didn’t say the choice of school is not important. But you are someone who clearly had a lot of choices. A lot of people won’t have the choices you had. The notion of get into Wharton or you’re screwed, though, is pretty silly. </p>
<p>For one thing, for someone who doesn’t have the mind, talent, or personality to work in the places you are talking about, what you are saying is pretty irrelevant. I was asked at one point in my life why I didn’t take a job with a prominent i-bank. My response was that i-banking and me were like oil and water. I would have hated it and flamed out. I knew a woman who went to Stanford, but focused on her art, and ended up getting a McJob…are you suggesting she should have gone and worked for McKinsey instead? You sound way too smart to suggest that. Trust me…she wasn’t the kind of person McKinsey would look for.</p>
<p>People need to be really cognizant of their own talents and limitations, and work from there. That applies within the reaches of the Ivy League as much as outside of it. </p>
<p>My post was directed at someone who felt imperiled at the prospect of not getting into the kind of school you’re at. And by the way, with the right classes, it’s quite possible that a 3.8 from Rutgers would have a better chance getting into med school than a 3.4 from Penn SAS.</p>
<p>I am extremely familiar with Wharton’s alumni network, and there is no doubt that kind of thing can help one out…in particular if one wants to go into finance. For your interests, it sounds like you made exactly the right choice…but that doesn’t make it the right choice for all or indicate that for people that don’t have your talents or choices that they are screwed.</p>
<p>OP, the reason coffee shop/McD’s guy has not been successful in life is because he insists on blaming his inability to move forward in life on silly things like his undergrad prestige. NO ONE works at McD’s with an undergrad Berkeley degree because people looked down on his school’s prestige. NO ONE. However, people who like to play the blame game and pretend circumstances are out of their control can quickly find themselves unemployed.</p>
<p>I also find it a little sad that you would base your college choices on what some McD’s worker told you. That doesn’t strike you as a bit silly?</p>
<p>If you believe that you can’t be successful in government, etc. without a top 20 degree, perhaps you should see the education backgrounds of some of the nation’s leaders.
Dick Cheney - UWyoming
Condi Rice - UDenver
Robert Gates - William & Mary</p>
<p>Oh, and check around for some of the people in government a bit lower down (I picked the State dept. for fun):
Henrietta H. Fore - Wellesley
Mark E. Kissel - Penn State
and plenty others.</p>
<p>There are really only a handful of firms or businesses that only recruit from a few schools. There are many, many more - and many just as good - that look at way more than the name on your diploma. I’m not recommending University of Phoenix - but man, there’s a range between that and Harvard.</p>
<p>Oh believe me, I wasn’t trying to say being at a place like Yale will help for grad school. You do get a bit of a boost for being at HYPSM-etc. but it no way compensates for the better gpa someone would have surely had at a “worse” school. I’m applying to law school now and I def know that I would probably be in a nicer position had I gone to a local school. </p>
<p>All I was saying was that if someone is planning to go out and do IBD at Morgan Stanley after they graduate, then taking a full ride at the local state over a Princeton is something one should think twice about. </p>
<p>That being said, I really can’t stress enough how secondary all these concerns (alumni network, job placement) are. People should just pick the school they think they’ll be happiest at. If that means taking FSU over Stanford because you like Florida or Chapman over Columbia because you hate New York, differences in prestige aren’t really close to as important as this board makes it out to be. </p>
<p>I know the vast majority of people on this board don’t view it like that and I’ll admit that I was part of that group when I was here in HS. College shouldn’t be a place to gun for a job, it really truly is some of the best time in your life and the least you can do for yourself is to choose a place you know, or at the very least think, that you’ll be happy at. I know its hard to view it like that right now but getting into Harvard really doesn’t matter that much in the end. Find a place you’re happy at and in the end, that’ll be where you’ll have the best experience. And no, being in the top 20 does not equate to being happy.</p>
<p>This thread title is preposterous.</p>
<p>A good friend of mine and former classmate got his journalism degree from the University of Nevada-Reno and is a sportswriter for the Washington Post. My current journalism adviser, who runs one of the best two-year college j-programs in the country, got his degrees from San Diego State. Neither of them could be remotely described as “screwed.”</p>
<p>Oh, and both of them attended community college before transferring.</p>
<p>Heh, you’re fine as long as you don’t go to Bob Jones University. :D</p>
<p>I dont agree with this point of view. Ive seen people study in terrible universities and have a really positive attitude and have a great life afterwards. Ive also seen people in the best universities, screwing their lives with their negative attitude towards things. There are many kinds of people and it is up to you whether you screw your own life or not, whether youre in a top 20 university or if you arent.</p>
<p>To: Bobby Jan
From : Ana Maria</p>
<p>I personally dont think it is true because your life is what you make out of it… yes youe have better chances of getting an awesome job but nothing is impossible. Many people who when they were little could not afford the these top 20 universities know have all the money yopu can imagine and by perserverance and determination they have succeeded and are importan!</p>