<p>truthfully-Your experience alone means nothing. We are talking about general trends here. You claim that I don’t know what I’m talking about. However, what I’ve wrote is much more informative than what you wrote. What’s wrong with my advise to the OP: “Why don’t you just go to the school you like. Talk to recruiters during your first and/or second year. If you don’t like what you hear, transfer to the other school (you obviously would be able to transfer if you have a high enough GPA for ib).”? Does that sound like a bad idea to you? On the other hand, all you have wrote so far are assertion with no support what-so-ever other than your word, which makes you seem like a high school student who doesn’t even know how to contribute to a discussion.</p>
<p>puneur – slipper1234 has nailed an important nuance. fifteen years ago, duke did have the clear edge. this on the basis of its network (an aside: frankly, i can’t think of an academic discipline in which i would consider duke to be in quite the same league as chicago – not saying one doesn’t exist; just that i can’t imagine what it would be). a duke bias does still exist in some segments of traditional “street” i-banking, although this advantage, i believe, is rapidly becoming so de minimus as to be, essentially, non-existent. This for two reasons:</p>
<p>1) the culture of traditional “wall street” i-banking is under assault. in such circumstances, old assumptions/preferences/biases feel the pressure.
2) the market (i mean “market” in the sense of certain collective cultural awareness) has begun to correct a persistent underestimation of chicago’s overwhelming intellectual firepower. in other words, chicago’s “q-score,” if you will, has gone parabolic. ($400 million gift to the business school, #1 business week ranking; undergraduate applications up a vertiginous 42% over the past year). duke is respected and, still, well-connected but chicago’s ineluctable ascendancy has become harder to overlook.</p>
<p>Also, I believe this discussion to be pertinent only if we define “wall street” as i-banking. on the other hand, insofar as the hedge fund industry is concerned, chicago is a monster. duke does not rank in the top ten. possibly not even the top 25.</p>
<p>addendum … fwiw, duke’s med school is killer; don’t know where chicago rates on that front. but that’s not really on-topic, is it? </p>
<p>bottom line, as they say: what really matters is not whether you go to chicago or duke … but what you do with yourself afterwards.</p>
<p>over and out</p>
<p>“on the other hand, insofar as the hedge fund industry is concerned, chicago is a monster. duke does not rank in the top ten. possibly not even the top 25.” Not at the undergrad level. When will people on this board learn to separate undergrad from grad? Yes, Booth is world class, possibly a tier or two above Fuqua, but that means nothing for undergrads who attend Duke and UChicago looking for internships and jobs.</p>
<p>Agreed. Undergrad and grad are totally different. You can’t mix this. </p>
<p>Truthfully- So few people go into the hedge fund space PRE-banking. And Duke is the bigger door into banking, which basically a pre-requisite for later jobs in high finance such as PE and hedge funds. I think you are mixing Booth MBAs power with Chicago undergrad.</p>
<p>I agree with slipper.</p>