<p>Y’know, I was watching ESPN and they were discussing Shaq’s retirement. They said something that caught my attention. ESPN said Shaq was the type of player who was not the 4.0 student who entrenched himself in academics, but was the 3.0 student who partied (referring to Shaq being a media darling, etc).</p>
<p>Why it caught my attention?..pretty much describes myself.</p>
<p>While many posters stress the whole “super-high GPA + AP Credits + Top-10 school + internships + super-high undergrad GPA + employment at some Big-4/Google/Microsoft/High-Finance career”…</p>
<p>…I am more of the “It’s OK to do the 2+2 programs, have no AP credits, have barely a 3.0 GPA (and that was just in the major) while partying, enter the workforce first after school, etc”.</p>
<p>While I am not devaluing the notion of going to great schools (Hell, I deliberately chose enrolling in the U-Wisconsin “System” for grad school because of Wisky’s name and I.E. ranking), I have be in the software development/engineering field long enough to see first hand that the whole career process is not so linear and exact.</p>
<p>Now maybe I did not hit that 6-figure salary plateau around year 8 out of my 20 years of working as opposed to the Top-10 grads who did either the finance or Big-4 consulting, I am fine with the fact that no other Math/CS major partied more than me (I have the repeated courses to prove this, lol)…and most of all, I worked/went to school to “live”…I didn’t live for work/school. I just made sure I picked a major and industry where I did not really need to compete. I wanted to pretty much “show up” at an interview and have a very good chance at the job mostly because of supply/demand. At the end of the day, it’s still work (since I cannot do it from a beach in Costa Rica). I want my mate to “want” me…I want my job/career/employer to “need” me.</p>
<p>Now how does all of that ramble relate to the OP?..the most prestigious job/company is SUBJECTIVE.</p>
<p>I tip my hat off to the folks who can get into the high-finance sector. Personally, I think I would have been a little too much into the social non-academic side of college to sustain that. I tend to totally forget about work when away from it so I would be bad at networking and the like.</p>
<p>So I still say that the most prestigious job/company is SUBJECTIVE.</p>