<p>Does anyone have any first hand knowledge of the MMSS program at Northwestern?</p>
<p>Yes, but I graduated from there in the mid-eighties so I’m a little out of date :-)</p>
<p>It’s a wonderful program.</p>
<p>I hear that it is a great program if you are looking towards doing something in business. I am actually kicking myself for not applying because the acceptance rate is so low.</p>
<p>It’s intellectually stimulating but very practical in variety of areas (academic research or finance/business) at the same time. It’s rare to have this combination.</p>
<p>It sounds really competitive. Any hints in what they are looking for?</p>
<p>For freshman admission, there is a heavy importance placed on ACT and/ or SAT scores. They are looking to build a diverse classroom so someone intending to major in Anthropology or Linguistics might have a better chance of getting in than an Economics major, assuming all other factors are equal.</p>
<p>I’m currently in it, and absolutely hate it. It definitely differentiates you from 320494 other econ majors here who aspire to be ibankers or consultants, but because the group is so small and most people in it give up either sleep or social life to study, it’s very hard to get good grades because classes are graded on a curve.</p>
<p>Oh sweet brown, is there anything good about the program? On paper it seems great.</p>
<p>Anyone else out there that has experience with the program?</p>
<p>Anyone submit an application to MMSS tonight?</p>
<p>^I have no knowledge about the grading except the fact that half the class are below the median by definition. When you are in an honors program within an already elite university, there is going to be quite a bit of pressure to just try to keep yourself above the median. It is a rigorous program and there’s a senior thesis to write on top of your primary major (you can not graduate with MMSS alone).</p>
<p>You’d think the applicants for the sophomore entry would have heard things first-hand from the MMSS students. The fact that sophomore admission is even more competitive seems to tell me the benefits/positives outweight whatever negatives they might have heard.</p>
<p>Here are two seemingly contradictory views in terms of job placement:</p>
<p>CC member A:
</p>
<p>CC member B:
</p>
<p>I’d give it a try to reconcile the two based on what I read from various sources. For IB, they really don’t care about those fancy math you have, as member B said. Why?, Because contrary to what many people may think, you hardly do any high finance modeling as a typical associate in IB. Most of the daily tasks are actually more administrative than financial in nature. High GPA from a top school (such as NU), prior internship experience, interesting ECs, and outgoing/interesting personality are probably the most important.</p>
<p>But for other employers, especially those that value math skills, such as econ research, etc, MMSS would differentiate you from hundreds of other econ majors. They are those “ridiculous number of doors” member A referred to.</p>
<p>Wow! Thank you for posting with such a breadth of prospectives!</p>
<p>Any one get a notified about their acceptance?</p>
<p>Haven’t heard anything yet. Originally they said it would be 1-2 weeks after our acceptance, usually early April. Hopefully we’ll hear back this week.</p>
<p>Also, you think it’ll be by mail or email?</p>
<p>For ISP, it was email first followed by regular mail. Presume same is true for MMSS too.</p>
<p>Just got accepted to MMSS for next year as a freshman! Yay! They sent an email…</p>
<p>Same! So pumped.</p>
<p>I’m CC member A in Sam Lee’s post. Totally disagree with what sweetbrown said - there will be a trade off between social life and sleep (it’s college), but it’s less of a workload than quantitative/hard science major (i.e. the workload is substantially lower than any premed/engineer student). It’s also probably higher than a pure econ major, but it’s on the spectrum, it’s closer to pure econ than it is to engineer. </p>
<p>Grades thing only sort of makes sense - average MMSS GPA is a 3.6, and MMSS classes are usually curved to an A-/B+ (i.e., 50% of the class gets an A- or higher) rather than the typical econ class which is curved to a B. This is to account for the fact that MMSS students are higher caliber than the average student at Northwestern and the program doesn’t want to penalize students GPA for taking harder classes.</p>
<p>Feel free to ask me any questions.</p>