<p>@intparent it sounds like what you heard on two different tours of the same campus five years apart could have been two different tours from two different students on two different days at any campus, anywhere. Maybe some tour guides like telling stories about the hammer and sickle, others like telling stories about the city…? I wouldn’t read too much into a rehearsed snippet with one student.</p>
<p>If your child is looking for an off-beat, distinctive kind of community, there are many colleges (including UChicago) that fit that bill, IMO. Reed, Carleton, Grinnell, Bryn Mawr, Beloit, St. John’s College, etc. etc. etc. all pride themselves on being a little offbeat and untraditional. </p>
<p>I graduated a couple of years ago. I applied-- and got in-- back in the day where an admit rate under 50% was a biiiiig deal. Keep in mind that every class, every year, complains that the incoming class is too “normal” to the point where it’s a bit of a tradition. I was talking to a fourth-year the other day who had this same complaint: the current first-years are too cool. They drink too much. They aren’t intellectual enough. They just want to party and get laid. </p>
<p>“Do you know that we said the same things about YOUR CLASS?” I asked. </p>
<p>@chinablue I don’t know you and I don’t know your daughter. “Nerdy” is in the eye of the beholder. The students who come here generally come here to learn first and take the fringe benefits that come with the package second.</p>
<p>But anecdotally, I graduated a few years ago and here is a list off the top of my head what my friends are doing:</p>
<ul>
<li>Teach for America (friends in DC, NYC, Chi, SF, etc.) </li>
<li>Google (one in Ann Arbor, one in SF)</li>
<li>Goldman in NYC</li>
<li>Bain</li>
<li>Draft FCB (big marketing firm flagship in Chi)</li>
<li>Law school (Stanford, few at Duke, Columbia, NYU)</li>
<li>Yale divinity</li>
<li>Booth (some full-time, others part-time)</li>
<li>HBS</li>
<li>One is an i-banker by day, stand-up comedian by night</li>
<li>Running for state assembly </li>
<li>Doing marketing for a social justice institute in Chicago</li>
<li>Cato</li>
<li>Few are pretty high up in the White House (for being mid-20’s)</li>
<li>UBS in London</li>
<li>Starting an edu consultancy firm</li>
<li>Law firm in China</li>
<li>Med school Hopkins</li>
</ul>
<p>Just a small sampling. I’ve been to a few “Ivy-Plus” mixers and one stark difference was that all of my UChicago peers seem to love the path they were on. This seemed to be the case only about half the time with the Ivy-ers; many conversations ended with, “Yeah, I mean, it’s fine.”</p>
<p>As noted earlier, S1 and his GF, both from UChicago, have great jobs they really like. All of S1’s friends are doing things they like and feel is important. Being from UChicago has conferred a certain immediate confidence by employers in their abilities to solve problems and in their ability to write, reason, and work hard.</p>
<p>Of note about the statistics funcomes2apply listed (found here: <a href=“Home | CareerAdv):%5B/url%5D”>Home | CareerAdv):</a></p>
<p>If you scroll to the bottom, you’ll see that about 35% of students pursuing further schooling go into PhD programs. That’s such a high percentage! The academic bent still seems quite present in Hyde Park.</p>
<p>“UChicago has conferred a certain immediate confidence by employers in their abilities to solve problems and in their ability to write, reason, and work hard.”</p>
<p>My DS2, a first-year, has said more or less the same when commenting about his peers - they are smart, they are confident, and everyone knows what it means to work hard. And, honestly, DS2’s peers are upbeat and can-do; my DS2 associated that common trait as somehow being ‘midwestern’ when he arrived - sarcasm is a bit of an institution in our east-coast enclave. And, the current first years LOVE the place they are - DS2 has been actively lobbying other kids from his HS to apply since his first week on campus.</p>
<p>It depends on how you look at it. The sheer % of people holding jobs doesn’t say much. What’s more important is the quality of the jobs that are available to the students, especially given the academic reputation UChicago enjoys.</p>
<p>Given all that, UChicago career services still has long ways to go. Unless you are going into finance, an industry where the school has done very well in terms of placements, the options available to you are not as diverse as it is at other schools. </p>
<p>For example, if you want to go into management consulting, your choice is very limited. Many of the most well-known firms simply do not recruit at U of C, for full time or internships. Given the caliber of the students here, there is no reason this should be the case. </p>
<p>Same goes for industry positions. Many Fortune 500 companies that should come here don’t. I don’t know why that is, but that does affect your employment prospects.</p>
<p>I’ve only mentioned business jobs as that is what I’m interested in. But I imagine same can be said about other industries as well.</p>
<p>pnb2002 - you raise some good points, and the general consensus is: strength of uchicago exit options is still inconclusive, given a lack of transparency by the administration.</p>
<p>As an example of what uchicago should be doing, here is a VERY detailed, publicly available report summarizing exit options for Penn’s College of Arts and Sciences, Class of 2011:</p>
<p>This is an outstanding report, and helpful for alumni, undergrads, and prospective students. It breaks down just how many grads from Penn’s College’s roughly ~1600 member class are going into what industries, what specific jobs they are taking, salaries, etc. As you can see, Penn grads do wonderfully well. UChicago grads should be doing the same, but who knows? </p>
<p>UChicago has nothing like this, and, I have no idea why they hide the ball here. It’s ridiculous. Prospective students interested in their career prospects should absolutely contact the career services office and ask to see as much info as they possibly can.</p>
<p>That Penn report is amazing; I’ve never seen anything like it.</p>
<p>The head of the Penn Career Services office is a friend, and a wonderful, warm person who can do the whole gamut of human relations from full-on hippie to anal-retentive corporate. It doesn’t surprise me at all that she gets great results and has transparent reports.</p>
<p>JHS - it’s a model for what other schools should do, especially a school like UChicago, which did not have good career services support for quite some time.</p>
<p>What’s wonderful about the report is that any interested party - from an alum to a prospective student to a current student - can look up exit options by industry, by major, by salary, whatever. It’s so informative! </p>
<p>Again, UChicago should try and do something similar. It’d just be very helpful.</p>
<p>The report is quite good. In the 1990s I was involved with a community college system that provided essentially the same information for their programs. Further, each professional/career program’s continued existence was contingent upon their results. If the data exist for them, it exits for all colleges. </p>
<p>In some ways I think Chicago’s legacy of trying to separate the mission of inquiry and pursuit of knowledge from the somewhat corrupting influence of job and making money may still have a lingering influence. I must admit, I too still feel there needs to be a separation of sorts. While job and career are important, the pursuit of being an educated person has always been Chicago’s main objective. One can hope education and a good job or good placement in a professional program are not mutually exclusive. However, if there are times they are, I always hope that the job and career will the one that has the least influence. I do not want to hear at Chicago what S1 heard while taking chemistry at Harvard, “Why are you asking that question? It won’t be on the MCAT.”</p>
<p>So President Zimmer was here in town yesterday and I went to an event last night in Beverly Hills.</p>
<p>And, on the one hand, I spoke to the mother of a current student, who was concerned about whether UChicago was changing and the university might just be jacking up its admit stats with a bunch of unqualified applicants. And I assured her that this was not the case, since the numbers show the increases are coming from the top feeders school, such as Harvard-Westlake here in LA (where her son went to school.)</p>
<p>But, on the other hand, she went on in her next breath to say that her son was majoring in econ and she hoped he would go into investment banking. (She went to Cornell for grad school.) But her son told her he wanted to work for a company or organization that cared about ideas or social responsibility… And she was just standing there shaking her head, saying “But I said to him, can’t you just think about IB–going for the money?”</p>
<p>Anyway, I had to laugh typical UChicago! Here is the parent desperately hoping the kid will go for the money, and the kid says he cares about ideas! LOL!!</p>