Is transferring really necessary?

Hey cc. I’m an incoming freshman at NYU stern and I am 120% sure that I’m going to do investment banking for living. However, I have heard that prestige wise stern is somewhat inferior even to 2nd tier schools like Columbia, Penn, Uchicago, etc. So, do I really need to transfer to these schools? Plus I kinda want a real college experience.

Columbia, Penn, Uchicago are 2nd tier??

well compared to HYPSWM

No, transferring is not “necessary.” Come on now.

Stop by the NYU career center when you get to campus, and ask about the path to investment banking. You will find that there are plenty of resources at NYU to help you achieve your goals.

Stern is one of the single best placing schools in finance in the nation. Recruiting is better there than most of the ivies so I wouldn’t transfer. If you want real college experience transfer to schools such as UMich or UVA.or Duke.

Believe me, Ivies won’t give you a real college experience

Second thoughts about the school you’ve chosen to attend are pretty common this time of year. Wait and see how you feel once you get to NYU.

Any decision you make about transferring now is going to suffer from a severe lack of information.

If you decide later, you’ll have a wealth of knowledge about what your NYU experience is like - the classes, the urban campus, the friends and classmates, the extracurriculars, the traditions, the career center, etc.

Think like an investment banker. Research and gather data. Understand the risks before you act. Consider the strength of the position you hold before jumping to another one.

Wharton and Stern have historically been tied to IB placement and regularly top the rankings. None of the schools you listed are 2nd tier either… Also NYU in general isn’t a “real college experience”

  1. The schools you listed are certainly not “second tier”.
  2. It is unlikely you will be able to transfer into any of your so-called “second tier” schools anyway. And none of them (since I’m guessing Wharton at UPenn is the W you included as a “top tier”) have undergrad b-schools.
  3. Stern is an excellent business school with strong NYC business connections.
  4. Not sure why you chose Stern if you wanted a typical college experience. NYU is great, but not the typical campus experience.
  5. Why don’t you wait until you start college and see what you think.
  6. Absolutely no school in the world will guarantee you an IB job. They are few and far between. Expand your horizons.

Thank you guys so much for such insightful comments. I do want to study finance more than anything else and that was why I chose Stern over NU and Cal, which have the “typical college experience”. I guess it is too early for me to decide since I haven’t even started my college yet.

Yea man go to NYU, meet awesome people, get involved on campus starting early and find some clubs / frats you want to be a part of. NYU is such a fun experience if you do it right and in my opinion better than a typical college experience (How do I know - I’ve been to parties as state schools when visiting my friends, it gets boring real fast).

Freshman year just focus on grades and meeting people through student organization, that’s all you should be doing.

I chose Stern over Columbia and a lot of my friends here have chosen Stern over other great schools like Georgetown, Yale, Duke, UChicago, UPenn. Believe me, this is an incredible place with incredible opportunities ; just be sure to take advantage of everything it has to offer.

If you can get into Wharton, why not? For IB jobs, NYU is likely to give you even more opportunities than UChicago. Not all recruiters are willing to spend almost an entire day for just traveling to Chicago round trip.

happy1 gave you many good advices. Give NYU a try. It is indeed a very unique university in terms of college experience, and it probably takes special people to like it. You may be one of them.