As someone who recently received an offer as a consultant from a Manhattan firm (declining, but that’s for other reasons), here are my thoughts
This isn’t completely, accurate. But more importantly, the priority list only keeps your resume’s candidacy going instead of purely nailing you the job. After your school/major, its up to your individual qualifications/accomplishments. For example, someone from Grand Valley State in all likeliness gets their resume thrown out without looking at anything else. On the other hand, a Duke resume would remain the in the pile(with perhaps 25+ resumes) and be read other contributions to be perhaps considered for an interview. On the other hand, some firms want Harvard and Wharton only, so they would throw out all other applicants such as the Duke and GVSU resumes.
We were in the Kelley v. Michigan position 5 years ago. My son opted to take the risk and went to Michigan. He never regretted that decision, but the UM/Ross tuition and loss of the scholarships sure hurt the wallet. He had friends choose Kelley but none of them ended up in IBanking, mostly accounting. He did end up doing IB, as did many of his UM friends. I just spoke to a sophomore in Kelley last week and he said that the IB Workshop was doubling its number of students from 40 to 80. So the odds are now better at that school. The key to banking is the career center. Do the banks you want to work for have a pipeline to your college? Go ahead and major in what you want, but if you can’t get an internship interview your chances are really low and Ross gives preference to their own students. My son’s best friend majored in mathematics and is a Equity Derivatives Trading Analyst at Morgan Stanley. He was brilliant in math and had a great personality (which really helps in interviews) so it shows you don’t have to be in Ross to do IBanking, but engineers (my son’s boss, an Associate Analyst, was an engineer from LeHigh) and math wonks are the next best option. Getting into Ross requires good grades in Econ and the other required courses, BUT you also have to show other qualities and joining campus groups or any of the business fraternities (my son was in one and they helped with the application and interviewing tips) helps quite a bit. Now, the question is does your son mind 80 our weeks and leaving work at 2:30 AM on average? Then he will love IBanking. Believe me it takes a special kind of rigor to survive the job and most of his friends look like they haven’t seen the sun in months.
