<p>I graduated with a BS in Communication and have only 1.75 years of work experience. I'm not ready for an MBA (in a few aspects), but have become very interested in finance (or perhaps consulting) and want to make a career change.</p>
<p>What are the jobs prospects for the following schools, in other words, how attractive do they look to recruiters (all of them are strong academically I feel)?</p>
<p>-London School of Economics: Master in Finance
-Univeristy of Illinois: same
-Vanderbilt: same
-Boston College: same</p>
<p>Will I be hard pressed to find a solid finance-related position with no prior finance internships/experience? I-banking for instance. Thanks!</p>
<p>That’s a tough one. There isn’t a ranking for MS programs, which is usually only an indication of recruiter preference. Financial Times does give a ranking for MBA, so I would assume that they may be similar to MSF? </p>
<p>One option could be to inquire at the schools Career Management/Placement offices and find out what companies recruit there. Or, decide what kind of company you want work for and see where they attract most of their interns from.</p>
<p>London School of Economics destroys every other school on that list and will land you a job at any bank in the country.. it’s all a matter of being accepted, which is the tough part.</p>
<p>Dut99002 – why those schools? LSE is of course the tops, but where do you want to work. LSE is respected worldwide and extremely rigorous, but you’ll still need a lot of schmoozing to get into a bank as the waiting list queues are long (many local young grads, and MBAs keep knocking during recruiting cycles). </p>
<p>What you need to think about is where you want to work. Given that three of your four choices are in the US, it won’t hurt to look at NYU or Columbia. Why did you choose low-ranked schools though? Even MIT has a financial engineering MS. LSE will surely get you an excellent shot in London. </p>
<p>Alternatively, consider University of Toronto’s MFE. It’s a program you can take immediately after bachelors and it produces rockstars for Bay Street (Canada’s Wall Street). Presumptuous folks may deride Bay Street and call it a shadow of Wall Street, but the reality is that if you start with, say, Merrill Lynch in Toronto, and prove yourself, then you can move pretty much anywhere: NY, London, Tokyo. </p>