<p>
[quote]
If you want to get a job at the very best law firm, investment bank, or consultancy, here’s what you do:</p>
<ol>
<li>Go to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, or (maybe) Stanford. If you’re a business student, attending the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania will work, too, but don’t show up with a diploma from Dartmouth or MIT. No one cares about those places. </li>
</ol>
<p>...Here’s what a top consultant had to say about M.I.T.:</p>
<pre><code>You will find it when you go to like career fairs or something and you know someone will show up and say, you know, “Hey, I didn’t go to HBS [Harvard Business School] but, you know, I am an engineer at M.I.T. and I heard about this fair and I wanted to come meet you in New York.” God bless him for the effort but, you know, it’s just not going to work.
<p>Now, one might naturally argue that this wouldn't be an issue because MIT students don't care about working for such firms anyway. Yet that is belied by the fact that, before the economic crash, nearly half of all MIT undergrads who entered the workforce took jobs in finance or consulting. </p>
<p>Nearly half of all accepted offers were with consulting and finance firms.</p>
<p>If half of them took up jobs in finance or consulting, it can’t look that bad coming from MIT. </p>
<p>Also, depending on the kind of “consulting,” are a decent portion of the jobs not technical? And aren’t a lot of finance jobs programming-intensive + requiring some basic command of mathematics? That is, one can work for a finance company or a consulting company and require technical skills?</p>
<p>Or are there specific kinds of positions, employers for which do not seem to value MIT degrees?</p>
<p>I mean, I’m obviously a coddled ivory tower academic egghead who doesn’t know consulting and investment banking from a hole in the wall, but I certainly know plenty of MIT friends who are at consulting firms and banks that I am fairly sure are “top” ones.</p>
<p>I also know nothing about financial consulting/investment banking and all that, but I think they key word in the above quote is “engineer.” Whatever debate follows about engineers from MIT working at top consulting firms, I am pretty sure it doesn’t apply to Sloan graduates. Unless I am really that clueless. =P</p>
<p>I find this surprising. I would think that wall street firms would be looking for individuals with an analytical mind which engineers obviously have. I will clarify, engineering undergraduate degree(MIT, Cornell, Princeton) with an mba or mfe.</p>
<p>Just shows how unimaginative these firms can be. An MIT or Swarthmore, for example, are highly intellectual “niche” schools with alot of self-selection in terms of who even bothers to apply. While it may be true that students at Brown, Penn, etc. are there mostly because they didn’t get accepted at HYP (and may therefore be considered “second tier” in this bizarre stratification), students at MIT and Swarthmore are mostly there because they wanted to be there and were lucky enough to get in- these schools are academically unique.</p>
<p>Why is everyone on this thread taking The Chronicle of Higher Education’s story at face value? As a long-time reader of that rag (it appears in our faculty room), I’ve developed the opinion that articles published there avoid any sort of rigorous source checking or peer review.</p>
<p>A brief romp through the internet reveals the following about where some of the leaders of the most prestigious financial firms received their undergraduate degrees:</p>
<p>Hank Poulson, former CEO of Goldman Sachs- Dartmouth
Gary D. Cohn, president of Goldman Sachs - American University
Lloyd C. Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs - Harvard College
Charles Scharf, CEO Chase Bank – Johns Hopkins University</p>
<p>I started with Goldman Sachs and then took a peek at Chase, then stopped.
Someone else with time to burn (I had about 5 minutes) could probably develop a much longer list.</p>
<p>Typically, such people did not get in to those firms based on their undergraduate degrees, they got in based on their graduate MBA or law degrees. At the time those people started, undergraduate hires as “analysts” were rarely retained at their firms, they wre basically two-year temp jobs, then the individuals went elsewhere. The “permanent” leadership-track new hires were most typically from graduate programs.</p>
<p>Then don’t take the Chron at face value. Read the actual research paper that the article references, which has been peer-reviewed (albeit not in an A-level journal), which I have posted here:</p>
<p>The issue is not whether MIT students can obtain any finance/consulting position, as they clearly can. The issue is whether they can obtain the very best such positions. The answer to that question is still ‘yes’, but the odds seem to be lower than if you had attended one of the mentioned target schools. </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>My take on it is reminiscent of the infamous quote from former MIT Dean Ann Friedlaender:</p>
<p>‘‘Too many M.I.T. graduates end up working for too many Princeton and Harvard graduates,’’ said Ann F. Friedlaender, dean of M.I.T.'s School of Humanities and Social Science.</p>
<p>Actually, they’re not. In fact, the employees at the firms explicitly mention that the job itself is not particularly highly intellectual and success is more readily influenced by social skills. </p>
<p>I would trade an
outgoing, friendly confident person for a rocket scientist
anyday.”</p>
<p>*those without significant
extracurricular experiences or those who participated
in activities that were primarilyacademically or pre-
professionally oriented were perceived to be “boring,”
“tools,” “bookworms,”or“nerds” who might turn out
to be “corporate drones” if hired. A consultant(white,
male) articulated the essence of this sentiment:
We like to interview at schools like Harvard and Yale,
but people who have like 4.0s and are in the engineer-
ing department but you know don’t have any friends,
have huge glasses, read their textbooks all day,those
people have no chance here. . .I have always said,[my
firm] is like a fraternity of smart people.
A banking recruitment head(white,female)unpacked
the rationale behind the aversion to“nerds:”</p>
<p>We look for someone who’s got a personality,has
something to bring to the table. You know, for lack
of a better term, someone you can shoot the ****
with. . . Typically. . .they were in sports, they were
involved in different activities on campus. The more
well-rounded individual versus the candidate who has
the 4.0,who’s got all the honors and all the different
Econ classes." *</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>These firms may indeed be unimaginative. But, at the end of the day, they have the jobs that many top students seem to want, which means that you have to play by their rules. </p>
<p>Put another way, I’ve always wondered: why can’t elite engineering and science firms pay compensation levels commensurate to the elite finance and consulting firms? If they did, then it wouldn’t really matter what the latter firms may think about MIT.</p>
<p>I think that acceptance to HYP is a surrogate marker for “slickness” (and at least a solid level of intelligence), and this may in fact be what financial firms are looking for. M&A and equities trading do not require the kind of mind that wins a Nobel Prize (Swarthmore and CalTech have that pretty much covered, and MIT can’t be far behind). To Sakky’s above post: there is lot’s of money to be made when you take a cut of large sums of money changing hands, even if you don’t actually provide any goods or invent anything. Many in finance are really like glorified high-end realtors. Except for the rare commercially-successful entrepreneur, most scientists aren’t in that kind of racket.</p>
<p>I am so leery of media articles. IMO, the best opportunities go to the best prepared graduates. That’s more than an A average in one’s major.</p>
<p>*I would think that wall street firms would be looking for individuals with an analytical mind which engineers obviously have. I will clarify, engineering undergraduate degree(MIT, Cornell, Princeton) with an mba or mfe. *</p>
<p>I basically agree, but: top grad business programs will run their students through the wringer, to prepare them with the knowledge base, analytical skills and real-world case experience. </p>
<p>Aside from that, on a general level, just having an analytical mind offers an employer little assurance this applicant is the one who will help run his business. The days are gone when a math major could walk into a computer or finance job simply because he/she had been stress-tested in a tough, related acadmic track. Likewise, just having been a business major- or even economics or finance- shows little. Kids have to acquire relevant experience (responsibility, decision-making, some crisis management, etc,) internships while in college, etc, to distinguish themselves. And, these experiences often yield important connections.</p>
<p>Aren’t some of the “very best” positions highly quantitative and technical in nature? Especially in finance? Then again, perhaps these require graduate degrees, which may not be the point to what you’re asking.</p>
<p>And perhaps the “very best” on the scale of what is obtained with less education tend to favor different backgrounds.</p>
<p>I am curious how much education is typical for those who obtain these “very best” positions. An MBA? A master’s? Just straight out of college?</p>
I think it’s fairly obvious that one would prefer a finance major at Harvard, Yale, Princeton to an engineering major at MIT for a firm because, well, engineering doesn’t apply there.
Sloan is one of the top business schools in the nation, and it produces students who are very competitive in the job market.
If this is only considering undergraduate degrees, then it’s no surprise that firms don’t hire a lot from MIT (or anywhere aside from HYP, I would assume). The difference between an undergraduate degree and a high school degree is like the difference between working at McDonald’s and working at Applebee’s. It’s pretty significant, but you haven’t really gotten anywhere yet.
I’m tired of all these “look at this reason why this university might not be good” threads. Each university has weak points, but if you’re seriously trying to say that MIT is not a good university due to one metric, then you are lacking in critical thinking skills. Courses in logic at your local university are often interesting and look pretty decent on your college apps.</p>
<p>Do firms like DE Shaw and Renaissance Technologies have a preference for “soft” skills over technical ability?Would they prefer Harvard,Upenn&Yale graduates over MIT&Caltech grads?</p>
<p>I know a ton of MIT people at McKinsey and also Boston Consulting Group. One piece of the article was correct. I know McKinsey, the top consulting company, has a strict requirement on pedigree. He was from MIT, so obviously that was on the list.</p>