<p>Is it possible to get a job in investment banking if you are not from the ivies or top LAC's but have a good GPA, work experience and majored in something like engineering.</p>
<p>You don't necessarily have to go to an Ivy or LAC, but you probably should go to a top 20 school or so. Usually the Ivies, Stanford, MIT, Berkeley, Chicago, Northwestern, Duke, University of Michigan, University of Virginia LAC's, Georgetown, and a few others attract the best recruiters. Of course you can theoretically go anywhere, but going to those schools maximize your chances.</p>
<p>boomer01, employers don't really care where you graduated from unless it's like harvard or some other big name school. in the end... work experience is what counts. employers would pick you over a yale graduate w/o work experience. this is because you have both the college degree and the experience to qualify as a great employee.</p>
<p>It is of course true that experience is tremendously important, butI think the presumption that boomer01 is making is that he won't have any (relevant) experience. It's the old saw - how do you get a job without experience, and how do you get experience without a job? </p>
<p>Well, one highly effective way to square that circle is to graduate from a school where I-banks frequently recruit. That tends to mean what uc_benz pointed out, which are the Ivies, top LAC's, places like Stanford, MIT, UChicago, and others. I would also include various NYC schools like NYU as being unusually good I-banking recruiting grounds. </p>
<p>You also have to be careful about the value of experience. Don't get me wrong - experience is tremendously important. But what is perhaps even more important than that are connections. Surely you've heard of the phrase "It's not what you know, it's who you know". For example, ask yourself, how exactly did Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, even get hired into Microsoft in the first place? Don't you think that the fact that he just happened to be Bill Gates's old roommate at Harvard have anything to do with it? College remains one of the tried and true ways of establishing connections. The guy with awesome experience can and often does get beaten out for a job by somebody else who has less-strong experience, but is connected to insiders at the company. I-banking is no different - when a Yale guy becomes VP or managing director, it's not uncommon to come back a few months later to find a suspiciously large number of other Yale grads working in his department. Coincidence? I think not. </p>
<p>Bottom line - experience counts. But so do connections. I-banking especially so, because IB is a rather incestuous business.</p>
<p>OK, now in answer to the OP, the answer is yes, but it will require a lot of work, doubly so if you are not attending a college, like an Ivy, that is a traditional recruiting ground for IB.</p>
<p>sakky, i couldn't have said it better myself! if your work experience is relevant, then you should be fine. since you have a good GPA and work experience why not go for an MBA at an ivy league? that could increase your connections and make you a much more competitive candidate for investment banking.</p>
<p>Well, I'll wait for the OP to respond, but I don't think he was talking about getting an IB job after B-school. I believe he was talking about getting an IB job right after graduation from undergrad. So the idea of getting an Ivy MBA does not apply.</p>
<p>Yeah, I don't think he was talking about getting an MBA, that makes it all the more necessary to go to a top school to get an IB job. I-Banking, maybe more so than any other occupation, hires based on prestige. Just go to one of the top IB companies website and look at their recruiting list. Sure you can get an IB job from any college, but good luck to you.</p>
<p>Maybe you should also tell us where you would like to work at? Some of the smaller, botique firms would be easier to land jobs; Goldman Sachs, M. Lynch, MSD Witter, Citigroup, Soloman Bros. would be much more difficult. I, for one, am going to try and break into hedge funds with all my god-given power, but these are hard to get into even compared to IBanking.</p>
<p>well, what I was trying to say was can I get a investment banking job straight out of college considering if I have internship and co-op experience with them. I am planning to do mechanical engineering and applied to Purdue, Illinois, Texas and Georgia tech, I don't know if I can get the job if I graduate from those places?</p>
<p>purdue recruits a lot of engineers, i don't know about investment bankers though. my dad works for a big engineering company and says purdue is the #1 school they recruit from. but if you want to do investment banking why don't you major in finance?</p>
<p>well, I think engineering will give me a solid foundation for whatever field I pursue, so I wanted to major in it.</p>
<p>well, I think engineering will give me a solid foundation for whatever field I pursue, so I wanted to major in it.</p>
<p>it would... but if you don't want to go into engineering i would not suggest it. finance will give you the same solid foundation and since you want to go into investment banking i would recommend majoring in finance over engineering. that's just what i think though..</p>
<p>what exactly is investment banking? What do those in the profession do?</p>
<p>sry for my ignorance :)</p>
<p>yeah, boomer01, I think I have to agree with patientlywaiting and say that engineering may be a sucker's bet. If you have no intention of actually using your engineering training, then you may not want to study engineering. While it is true that engineering will give you a solid foundation for whatever you want todo next, on the flip side, engineering is extremely difficult. It is the engineers who generally have to constantly worry about flunking out, whereas everybody else can just take it as a given that they will graduate. </p>
<p>I know one guy who couldn't even really do recruiting in his final semester of his senior year as an engineer, because his cumulative engineering GPA was so low that he wasn't even sure that he would even graduate with his degree. How can you accept a job offer if you're not even sure you're going to graduate? This is a problem that generally only engineers experience. Many non-engineers can simply cruise, with basically a guaranteed degree. </p>
<p>Furthermore, even successful engineering students have to spend an inordinate amount of time on their coursework, because of its length and sheer difficulty. This massively cuts down on the time you have to network and do job recruiting. Contrast that with the non-engineers who, relative to engineers, have boatloads of free time with which to meet people. </p>
<p>Hence, if you don't want to work as an engineer, then I don't know that engineering is a good way to go. Engineering is the most 'jealous' of all the majors in that it demands massive amounts of time and effort, and if you refuse to give it, then you may end up being expelled (happened to several people I know). If you want to get into I-banking, then do a major that has something to do with I-banking (i.e. finance, econ) and also gives you plenty of free time so that you can do the legwork to get an I-banking job.</p>
<p>ok, I guess investment banking won't work for me. I am also interested in entrepeneurship . After getting my engineering degree, I want to have own company (something that deals with engineering) How would I go about doing this?</p>
<p>ok, boomer01... i don't think you know exactly what you want. so if you don't know what you want how can you expect us to know what you want? you said you want to have your own company with something that deals with engineering? that's very broad. if you are 100% sure you want to major in engineering, by all means, do. it's a wonderful profession, but it takes a lot of time commitment. it seems like you like business too, so perhaps you could major in engineering and minor in business. or better yet, major in engineering and get your MBA. however, you don't need a degree in entrepeneurship to be an entrepeneur.</p>
<p>Another question to ask yourself is what exactly do you like about engineering? what will you be specified in? electrical engineer, mechanical engineer, chemical engineer, what? i would also recommend looking into industrial engineer if you like both business and engineering.</p>
<p>I find it ironic that the two careers you are conflicting with are engineering and investment banking. </p>
<p>An engineering degree is one of the hardest, if not THE hardest, degree to obtain from college. You'll have to put long hours of studying in, put up with intense pressure, skip social events, and deal with mental exhaustion. You truly have to be dedicated to go through with engineering. </p>
<p>Likewise, investment banking jobs are some of the hardest to obtain. Goldman Sachs (which is the premier firm, but it serves for this example) makes applicants go through at LEAST 4 interviews. You pretty much have to graduate from a top college in order to even be considered for an investment banking job. Once you get the job, sometimes you can work up to 100 hours a week. The job is extremely taxing and most people leave after they get their money. </p>
<p>So my point is: you picked two of the most demanding careers possible. Each career requires intense dedication and it is not wise to simply pick one on a whim. Make sure you absolutely know which one you want to do; if not, you'll be asking yourself "WTF DID I DO??!?!?"</p>
<p>experience, experience, experience...
The only reason why employers might prefer a Harvard grad to "other grad" is that by getting through Harvard you've shown you can learn quite effectively. This is important because no matter where you're coming from they have to teach you what to do. However, if you already know what to do, then where you graduated from is quite irrelevant.</p>
<p>As far as the reason why employers prefer Harvard grads to 'other grads', I think there are 2 other factors that we need to keep in mind.</p>
<p>*Selectivity - Harvard is a tremendously selective school, and I think there is a very strong case to be made that employers are basically outsourcing their HR department to the Harvard adcom. To get into Harvard, you generally have to be extremely aggressive and self-motivated, with tremendous personal initiative, and that's exactly what a lot of employers want. Hence, I wouldn't say it's about making it through Harvard, it's really about making it into Harvard. Harvard is, honestly, not that hard to get through once you're in (it's far far easier to get through than that 'other' school in Cambridge, Mass), but that's the kicker - you gotta get in. </p>
<p>*Connections - Let's face it. Harvard has arguably the best-connected and most cohesive alumni network of any school in the world. Harvard alumni are notorious for 'incestuous' behavior - hiring other Harvard alumni, doing business deals with other Harvard alumni, and generally preferentially dealing with other Harvard alumni. A Harvard Club exists in practically every major city in the world to promote just this sort of behavior. There are lots of terms to describe this term - the Old Boys (and Gals) Network, "it's not what you know, it's who you know", whatever. </p>
<p>Hence, a lot of employers hire Harvard grads not just for what they know, but for their potential connections. This is particularly important in industries like I-banking and consulting which tend to be highly sales oriented, and hence depend on personal connections. A guy from the University of Podunk might actually know a heck of a lot more than the Harvard grad, but if the Harvard grad is able to use his alumni connections to bring in more business, then clearly the Harvard grad is a better hire.</p>
<p>I agree with Sakky's analysis - hiring from extremely selective schools is a handy way to pre-qualify your applicants. I'd add that providers of costly services (investment banking, high-end consulting) may find it easier to sell a client a newly minted MBA working on their account if he/she is from an instantly recognizable and ultra-elite school. Companies hiring for their internal management staff will emphasize prestige less and performance more.</p>
<p>Is Emory a good place for IB?</p>