UChicago seems like a great atmosphere for me based on what I’ve read --a no nonsense approach to academics but also a very cultured environment with interesting people.
What kinds of jobs do students who major in econ with spec in data sci degree get? Is it a good mix of Wall St finance jobs and also Data Sci/AI jobs at Silicon Valley or other major Fortune 500 companies? I’d like to work in either trading, hedge fund, or AI/Data Science after graduating college.
If you are thinking Wall St. finance you might also want to look into the Applied Math major.
Program of Study
The Departments of Computer Science, Mathematics, and Statistics offer a BS in Computational and Applied Mathematics. The program is designed for students who intend to specialize in computational and/or applied mathematics, as well as students who want to acquire a strong quantitative background to be applied in such varied areas as physics, biological sciences, engineering, operations research, economics, and finance.
http://collegecatalog.uchicago.edu/thecollege/caam/
If you go that route, be sure to supplement with some economics courses, particularly 200 - 202.
@JBStillFlying
I’ve heard that if you go to any of the major Wall St target schools, you can major in anything you want as long as your GPA is good, have work experience, and can do great at the interviews. Is that true? I’m thinking that the extra layer of data science with UChicago’s econ major would be helpful if I want to do Data Science/AI or do phd in econ, stats or something related.
Not sure about that first question - best to allow others who have targeted Wall St. to chime in. Programming and data science are great courses to take regardless of whether you pursue a professional career or a PhD, since they will give you options on what exactly to pursue following college. The Economics major will include recommended course work for the PhD track and it’s very likely that there’s overlap with the programming requirements under the Data Science specialization. Right now collecting and working with Big Data Sets is in vogue in both industry and academia.
OP. you may want to step back quite a bit and ask yourself why you want to go to University of Chicago. If your objective is solely to use UChicago as a conduit to get a lucrative finance job, that most likely will not sit well with the Admission Office. While UChicago College has changed a lot in the last couple of decades, it is still not a pre-professional school. There is no doubt a sizable portion of students that are more career oriented. But The College still holds its pride in “the life of the mind”. You may want to ask fundamentally why UChciago is a good fit for you and what you can add to the student population.
@85bears46 While that may have been true in the past, but they do seem to emphasize the outcomes when you visit the college. A young lady at one of the round table discussions spent some time talking about how as a philosophy major she landed a job on Wall Street with an IB firm. There is the reality that parents who are paying the bills want some sort of outcome that is other than a boomerang. Of course having said that I wouldn’t make make the outcome part of my application.
@CU123 Oh, I understand that. With $75,000 per year in tuition one has to be realistic. I have friends whose kids go to elite East Coast boarding schools asking me about UChicago because their kids are seriously considering applying. But the parents are all concerned about what kind of jobs the kids may get after college with an intellectual school like U of C.
Nonetheless, The College is not Wharton. Putting an emphasis on what job you can get AFTER college is likely not a good route to endear yourself to the Admission Office.
Ultimately, we are all doing marketing. The school is trying to market itself to the parents that after paying an equivalent price of Ferrari their kids are going to get a decent job offer. On the other hand, the applicant has to market himself/herself to be a valuable addition to the school community and not just use the school to land a job at a hedge fund.
Other than mentioning a potential field of employment, OP hasn’t indicated that he/she is choosing Econ/DS just to earn the big bucks. Read the post again concerning the atmosphere and environment of UChicago. One might have all sorts of reasons for wanting to work in Silicon Vally or on Wall Street; for instance, sparking to the challenge of solving particularly brainy and difficult problems under a tight deadline. Recognizing that those are valuable skills you are interested in isn’t the same thing as pursuing a material outcome at the expense of an intellectual experience.
Nobody has graduated with this degree, so literally nobody can answer your question. This major was created as part of UChicago’s push to make undergrads more employable, so take it what you will. Also because “Data Science” (which doesn’t mean very much) is a hot topic these days. And I say this as someone who has worked (and will continue to, if I don’t go to grad school) in Data Science.
Personally I am not a fan of the extra specialized degrees of any sort because they tend to box you in more. If you want to learn about AI and machine learning then take math and stat classes on probability, linear algebra, markov processes, etc. and that will be useful even if you change your mind. To a certain extent your major doesn’t matter because 48 class slots allows for a LOT of experimentation, but that’s even more of a reason to do a general major, and take specific electives. I have taken like 11 electives with two completely non-overlapping majors. And the most useful classes you can take are often one that are supposedly the least useful. Like Honors Calc. Do you ever really need to know how to prove that sin(1/x) is not uniformly continuous? No, not really, unless you become a mathematician specializing in analysis then it’s a handy little fact. But will solving that (and hundreds of other proofs) teach you how to think through problems methodologically and rigorously? Absolutely. In my opinion it will serve you a lot better than, say, Econ 200: The Elements of Chicago School Propaganda (widely regarded as a terrible class, especially compared to its honors counterpart) in terms of teaching you how to do econ even though the former has literally nothing to do with econ. It’s way more important to know how to think through problems in general rigorously than to learn shallowly about any specific problem. Fun fact: the econ department tells you to major in math if you want to go to econ grad school.
Still, if you are actually interested in these topics from a research perspective, TTIC (the Toyota Technological Institute) is on UChicago’s Campus and they produce a ton of really, really, really interesting and impactful research about machine learning and AI. A lot of interesting algorithms that have been used to make Wall Street leeches - err, quant finance firms - very rich were developed here. People who are interested in machine learning research (despite my interests in math and computer science, I am not one of them: I do social science, and just use ML as a means to an end - this is an important distinction) do really, really well here. There are tons of opportunities and the field is extremely fertile ground right now since it’s so new. Many of them use their research experience here to get jobs at famous large tech firms but for them the appeal is more getting paid more than they would in academia to continue to do research than the famous large tech firms itself. However, if you are trying to get into famous large tech firms, this is probably one of the worst ways to do it: the research world is intense, stressful, and very competitive and a very inefficient way to try to get into Silicon Valley. Also you will probably be miserable if you don’t like research itself. Why would you spend 20 hours a week on top of your already massive schoolwork solving difficult math problems to get third author (if you’re lucky) on a paper that might be published which might lead to impressing companies that might have the spare cash to pay you to continue doing this (if you are literally the best) when you could just go to Stanford, take one class on Javascript, and watch as recruiters fight over themselves to interview you (seriously look up the costs of a spot at a Stanford career fair)? In Silicon Valley, image matters a lot, and our image is “Who?” so you’ll have to do the hard work of convincing them to take you seriously.
Regardless, you really don’t need to go the erudite source if you all you want to do is get a job. I’ve said it before and I’ve said it again, UChicago is an awful place to be if all you want is to gun to wall street or silicon valley. You’ve got the quarter system, the core, the winter, the fact that getting good grades takes a lot of effort… And when it comes down to it the UChicago name just isn’t as strong as Harvard, Princeton, Wharton, Stanford, etc. If you come, come for UChicago, because you’re gonna be here for four years.
@HydeSnark - what do you think of the Applied Math major? Was that created to make undergrads more employable or has it been around for awhile? Can one be a just plain old “Math” major and take the same courses, either as part of the major or via electives? (in other words, can you create the same outcome by choice w/o declaring the “applied” part of the major)?
Yes you could easily take the math major and do all the CAM class. Heck, I’m only missing 5 (out of 18, including electives) classes for the CAM major, and I didn’t do that on purpose. Most of it was for the math major.
I would take them at face value when they, on the course page, “The program is designed for students who intend to specialize in computational and/or applied mathematics, as well as students who want to acquire a strong quantitative background to be applied in such varied areas as physics, biological sciences, engineering, operations research, economics, and finance.” It makes sense to me. There are lots of people like math, stat, and CS but don’t want to commit to finishing the entire major because they are more interested in something else. It’s a good second major.
CAM is kinda old and you can tell because, despite being an “applied math” major, it makes you take (proof-heavy) analysis. It’s a very different breed of specialized major from more recent ones that are created as a way to let you get around requirements (i.e. Business Econ that drops a lot of the stringent math requirements).
On the question of a Chicago education and future success I very much recommend the 2002 Aims of Education address of Andrew Abbott:
home.uchicago.edu/aabbott/Papers/aims2.pdf.
The stats he was looking at then were from the Class of '75 - that is, from days when the student body was supposedly less accomplished, rougher around the edges and much less focussed on material achievements; when the Core and grade deflation were more extreme, the brand less well-known and any assistance in finding jobs minimal. Even the winters were likely colder! Yet twenty years out nearly all those kids, says Abbott, were in the top quarter of American income distribution. Their median personal income was five times the national median, their median household income at the 93rd percentile. There were no large differences of outcome among them in respect of their majors, and indeed their professional destinations were not very predictable by their majors.
These stats and a good deal of very interesting analysis that accompanies them leads Professor Abbott, a sociologist, to the conclusion that if you are a student at the University of Chicago you are going to do all right in the world. Therefore you might as well relax and enjoy the ride, educationally speaking, without focussing on future worldly success or even utilitarian cognitive development. These things will happen as byproducts of the main event - a real education. “The reality is that education is a present quality of self, a way of being in the moment. And that quality is its own aim, because it expands our present experience and hence is worthwhile in itself.” If an education leads to worldly accomplishment perhaps that is because “cultivating education - a sense of a self that perpetually, restlessly looks for new meaning in situations and facts and ideas - is a crucial resource for the future, because the future is a series of contingent moments just like the present.”
Academic fields don’t have sharply defined edges. For years, the Economics Department has recommended that students interested in pursuing PhD studies in economics major in Math with Specialization in Economics rather than economics itself. And you would think (or I would think, without a whole lot of sophistication about higher level math) that “Math with Specialization in Economics” would be applied math, but at least at Chicago it isn’t in the (relatively new) Computational and Applied Math Department, but rather back in the plain old unapplied Math Department. I believe, however, that it’s also possible to focus on economics via the Applied Math degree, too.
And you can swerve in other directions, as well. Computer science, statistics, operations research, sociology, psychology, and biology all have lots to say about creating and exploiting gigantic data bases.
What your major is called is a lot less important than what skills you have learned, and how far up the learning curve you are on what your employer actually does – remembering that practically no fresh college graduate is all that far up any interesting employer’s learning curve.
I wrote all of the foregoing hours ago, and @HydeSnark really preempted it. Pay attention to that post! Not only for what it says, but for the attitudes and experiences it represents.
I will, however, note that the Computational and Applied Math major is relatively new – maybe three or four years old – and has not had a lot of graduates. The regular Math major remains one of the most popular majors in the college. For years, the regular Math major offered an Applied Math track within the regular math major, which looked a lot like Math with Specialization in Economics except instead of specializing in Economics you were supposed to specialize in some other social, physical, or biological science. Because it was Chicago, the overlap between Applied Math and Math was substantial, and I think that’s still the case even though Applied Math now has its own department.
If you look at Harvard, in the grouping Math, Applied Math, Statistics, the percentages are 20%, 50%, 30%. Roughly. I think that suggests where the money is. Which is to say, it’s not in one place, but if it were in one place that place would be Applied Math. At Chicago, the ratios are roughly 60% Math, 10% Applied Math, and 20% Statistics.
These are very interesting observations. Some real nuggets of wisdom here for anyone seeking a math - or indeed any particular - major at UChicago.
I think we may have lost OP, a high school junior, in this typical U of C long intense discussion ;).
You might be right, @85bears46 , but of course we on this forum write for a variety of readers and for the purpose of providing many sorts of information and perspectives. We can thank the OP for making a query capable of provoking some very interesting and informative responses, though I’m afraid that the particularity of the subject line may have filtered out a number of potential readers who could well have benefitted from these observations.
When I was a high school kid starting to think about these things I longed for more information. It was so hard to come by - just what was in college catalogs and a paragraph or two in a couple of compendia of colleges. I would have killed for the kind of inside dope provided above by, among others, a current student, the parent of a current student and the parent of two recent students. Perhaps even the observations of an alumnus or two. Limited or even outdated as the information of any one of us may be, taken together with many other observations both here and elsewhere it all begins to form a picture of the place. A perceptive reader might even begin to pick and choose among these perspectives, seeking the ones that fit with his or her own ideas of self and community. That has to be an improvement from the almost blind rolling of the dice based on intuition and longing that characterized my own choice of school and city long ago. Though I do suggest that an element of mystery and distance will always remain, waiting to be filled in by one’s own unique experience on arrival at the place of one’s projections, dreams and, inevitably, misinformation.
The internet has contributed to much better knowledge or awareness about, say, a particular college, but it probably should also be credited with enabling better college matches and improving the quality of student at each school. Not the only factor, of course, but an important one nonetheless.
As an aside, I looked at the career placement list and it seems as if the school has nearly half of the school goes into finance and consulting upon graduation.
If I don’t particularly love the humanities (But dont necessarily hate it either), can UChicago still be a good fit with their core/gen ed requirements?
OP, you are going to be taking some humanities courses in college regardless of where you end up. Your question is whether the core curriculum sounds exciting or ok or a real turn off. We know many kids who have viewed it as a turn off and so they didn’t apply.
You can read through the core curriculum here:
http://collegecatalog.uchicago.edu/thecollege/thecurriculum/#generaleducation
UChicago is an intense place. You really have to want to be there. I would not apply just because finance and consulting dominate the career placement stats. By the way, the reason they do so is that those employers really like smart and articulate hires who are able to think critically. However, UChicago is not the only school that sends a good number of its graduates to Wall Street or McKinsey.
OP, you are looking at the Industry Outcomes from the Class of 2017 Report:
https://collegeadmissions.uchicago.edu/files/documents/class-2017-outcomes.pdf
That number is for people going into industries.
But if you look at the bottom right hand corner at the Career Advancement Office homepage, it says something like this:
Popular Industries:
23% Education/Academia
21% Business/Fin Srvcs
10% Consulting
10% Public Service/Govt
7% Science/Tech
https://careeradvancement.uchicago.edu
So by narrow margin the most popular destination is graduate work, which can be a PhD or professional school.
I would let current students answer your question. My guess is that if you hate humanities intensely, then any school with a general education core may not be a good fit for you. On the other hand, if you are at least willing to try and be open mind, a general education may expand your mind and horizon.
I make no value judgment here. There is nothing wrong hating humanities or STEM. Everyone’s utility curve is drawn differently and there is perfectly natural in having strong academic preference.