<p>So I've gotten into University of Miami (UM), Penn State University Park and Northeastern for the Business programs. </p>
<p>I'm really not sure which university I should choose. These are my views so far on these schools:</p>
<p>UM - It's a good school located in a great city with an amazing weather. It's somewhat a party school. The academics are pretty strong, I think. But I feel that it doesn't necessarily have any strong points such as Northeastern's co-op.</p>
<p>Northeastern - It seems like a good school in a cool college town with real cold weather. It's got a great social scene. The really strong point of NEU is that it has the co-op program (which has really captured my dads interest in the school as well). However, apart from the co-op program, I'm not sure how the academics are at the school. </p>
<p>Penn State - I don't know much about this school, apart from that its in the middle of no where and is a huge party school! If you could give me some pointers about its Business program/school that would help a great deal! :)</p>
<p>Overall, can you guys please give your advice/opinion and knowledge of the schools. Any help will be greatly appreciated!</p>
<p>Hey, I don’t know much about Northeastern (except for my friends dad went their, loved it, and ended up going to Harvard for grad, and it has a great internship/career services) but I’m also looking at Umiami and Penn State Smeal. </p>
<p>Penn State- It’s ranked highly as a business school, 21 by US news and 29 by Business week. Penn State has great networking because it is such a big school and their are plenty of alumni spread out throughout the nation,especially the Northeast.
UMiami- Miami is a school that gets better every single year and has a business program that is being run by Dean Barbara Khan, who previously worked as a Vice Dean and Director of undergraduate admissions at Wharton which is undoubtedly the #1 business school in the country. </p>
<p>As an overall school, Penn State is ranked a little bit higher 47 vs 50, but you have to remember Miami has a lower acceptance rate and a higher SAT average for incoming Freshman. I think the acceptance rate this year is somewhere around 30% if you multiply their yield rate to how many seats and applicants they have. </p>
<p>Even if you give the academic edge to Penn State, which I am skeptical about and think you shouldn’t always go by rankings especially considering Umiami is a much smaller school and and has a lower student-faculty ratio, I think Umiami wins in almost every social aspect-Weather, nightlife, beaches, diversity, great city etc
I would choose Umiami and I’m hopefully heading there next fall… Hope I helped out,sorry if my response is scattered haha</p>
<p>I’m looking for more of a city , as I am used to that lifestyle.</p>
<p>At the moment I’m in the situation in between choosing between Northeastern and Miami, not really PSU because its in the middle of nowhere and has that major party tag attached to it. I like Miami for the weather, girls, amazing nightlife and obviously being a top 50 school. Northeastern for having the awesome co-op, being based in a cool college town and having a good job placement.</p>
<p>Also would it be the same if I did the co-op at Northeastern or finished my 4 year undergrad at Miami and then did work experience for a year? I plan to join my dad’s business after undergrad, but my dad insists that I have some work experience beforehand.</p>
<p>I can’t remember how many times I’ve written this but here goes…</p>
<p>Undergraduate business programs are predominantly if not exclusively regional when it comes to hiring. Local companies and the local offices of large companies will send representatives to screen candidates for opportunities in their region which only makes sense given the time and cost involved - Why would a San Francisco based company send people to Miami or Boston or Happy Valley to recruit undergrads when it has a perfectly good pool of candidates at Stanford, Berkeley and the other UCs? From time to time large businesses will offer exceptional candidates the chance of picking a location to start their careers in, but that is comparatively rare.</p>
<p>The real value of an undergrad business degree rests in the career center and alumni network that grads can tap into. Typically that means the area geographically closest to the college. So the real question is not which school is the best? It is where do I want to first work after I get out of school? Miami will obviously have its strongest connections in Florida and the Southeast. Northeastern will be especially strong in Boston, (probably where most of the co-op opportunities are), though it will have contacts along much of the Northeast. PSU will doubtlessly be strongest in Pittsburgh, Philadelphia and the mid-Atlantic area. This doesn’t mean you can’t get a job in California if you go to any of these schools, it just means that the local graduate is going to have a bigger-stronger network to tap into.</p>
<p>Finally a word about rankings: They are irrelevant. The hiring is regional, so the local office will have its pick of the handful of schools available to them; it doesn’t matter if PSU is higher ranked than Miami because the Miami company isn’t going to PSU to interview. Managers in the real world don’t look at rankings, we look at individual performance. I was a hiring manager for over 20 years, during that time one of the hard and fast rules was, no interviewing anyone with less than a 3.0. We simply assumed that if you had attended a reputable college and had performed well that you therefore probably possessed the requisite skills to get the job done. In 20 years I never once heard a discussion about one school being ranked higher than another; if it came down to two otherwise equal candidates we would usually choose the higher GPA. Schools are like horses, candidates are like jockeys, smart companies choose winning jockeys.</p>
<p>My recommendations:</p>
<p>Try to decide where you might like to live after graduation.</p>
<p>Contact the career center at each school and see if you can get information about recruiting companies and cities where graduates end up.</p>
<p>Answering both of those questions should make things a little clearer.</p>
<p>Vinceh-
Your post makes a lot of sense to a point. Coming from California, I’d go to Harvard or Penn in a heart beat. My daughter is trying to choose between Indiana, Miami, Wisconsin, or California schools that aren’t known for business but have the home advantage. UC Davis, a predominantly science oriented school, has “Managerial Economics”-their version of Business. My feeling is if she goes to the highest ranked business program that she got into (IU-Kelley) she will take that education with her. I also think (and have heard) businesses watch the U.S. News rankings. SO what does one do when the state they want to live in doesn’t have the top business schools? She doesn’t want to go to a Cal state school (3rd tier ranked school). Go to a science school and hope for the best???</p>
<p>To a great extent you have reinforced my argument. Undergrad business programs are local. Even at the mighty Wharton, (Harvard doesn’t have an undergrad B-School), many of the BS grads end up on the East Coast, predominantly NYC. Sure a Wharton B.S. may open more doors for you in Portland Oregon than a Miami B-School B.S., but both will be dwarfed by the contacts the the University of Oregon grad will have.</p>
<p>I will repeat myself, when it comes to undergrad B-Schools I never once had a discussion about a school’s ranking. Were we aware that a certain school had a good reputation? Sure, but I never knew nor cared whether a school was ranked 8th, 17th or 47th; we simply had more important things to worry about. I just cared about finding the best candidates in the pool I was searching through, regardless of any arbitrary ranking. Depending on our needs, we’d interview at 4 or 5 of the “usual suspects” and be done with it. It was all local unless a non-local undergrad figured out a way to get in for an initial interview; in the Chicago office I would have been fired if I went to my boss asking for more money to go interview B.S.s at Miami, or Texas or BC or even Wharton. Like it or not, undergrads were viewed as interchangeable, no one school being particularly better than another. MBAs were different, they were interviewed regionally from a list of “approved” schools and the best were brought into a centralized location for further interviews; but we also hired fewer of them and paid them a lot more, so we were naturally fussier.</p>
<p>Your daughter will get a great education at IU-Kelley, but understand that most of her on-campus interviews will be with companies in the Midwest, predominantly Chicago. I interviewed 1 Kelley grad when I was a manager in Boston, I saw dozens of them when I worked in Chicago and Minneapolis. As for not having a “good” undergrad business school in California, what about UCBerkeley-Haas or USC-Marshall?</p>
<p>Yes, Berkeley has a great reputation (although Haas is supposed to be so competitivve and cutthroat I don’t think it would be a pleasant experience for anyone) but she didn’t get into Berkeley. USC is really expensive and we told her she could go there for grad school. I don’t think it’s worth it to spend over $200,000 on an undergraduate education.</p>
<p>Vinceh, thanks a lot for your input, much appreciated.</p>
<p>But I think you slightly misunderstood my point. I will be join my father’s business after my undergraduate degree, but he insists I have experience beforing joining him. So if I go to Northeastern I will join him straightaway after graduating because I will have had experience through the co-ops. But if I go to Miami I will probably have to work for a year after graduating to gain some work experience. My question is that is there any difference between either of those methods (one of them being working and studying (NU) and the other being finish studies and then work(UM))?</p>
<p>karanz I think the answer to your question is to do both. </p>
<p>My question about co-op programs is how do they truly differ from internships (beyond getting paid)? Co-op students do have some training but you aren’t going to give a college student with two or three years of classwork the same responsibilities that you give a four year grad. So in that sense is the co-op experience truly the same as working? On a certain level yes, because you are going to work full-time for the duration of your co-op experience, but on the other hand you are most likely not going to be getting exposed to the full range of technical and political issues most jobs face. </p>
<p>Don’t misunderstand, I loved students with co-op experience, it showed that they’d actually “done it” on some level. It gave them an edge in my mind but not much more than an applicant with diverse, intense internships, and they certainly didn’t have an advantage over someone who’d been out in the work force. Since you plan on going into the family business I’d suggest going someplace where you can reasonably get co-op or “good” internship experiences and then work for a year or two before joining your father. The more variety you have in your experiences the more you will bring to the table when you join the family business. Of course, your Dad’s opinion may vary.</p>
<p>was stuck between northeastern business and umiami business for the past three months.</p>
<p>sent in my deposit for miami two weeks ago. both gave me around the same amount of merit money and my biggest concern was passing up Northeastern’s co-op and not being able to find a job if i went to miami.</p>
<p>ended up choosing miami though because i heard a lot of people say Northeastern’s co-op program messes with campus life at northeastern because everyone is continually on and off the campus taking jobs all over. Although this would have been an interesting experience, i chose to stick with the regular 4 year college experience miami had, and it really is a school that is continually improving and gaining recognition. i spent days looking at the business week rankings and finally just said screw it lol</p>
<p>Vinceh, you made some really strong points which has got me to think. I guess I’ll have to decide where it is that I truly want to be in the end, since both these schools seem to be similar.</p>