You should ask all the coaches that you are in contact with to pre-read you. Being a recruited athlete is great because you will know based on your transcript and test scores if required if you can be accepted to the school or not. Make sure every coach has your transcripts and test scores as soon as the official transcripts are done. If the school is test optional do not send unless your ACT score is 30 or better or your SAT is above 2,000.
Once they pre-read you the coach will tell you where you fall in. The term band is sometimes used, A, B, C. If you are that strong and could improve the team by a great deal a coach will be inclined to use up his C slot to get you in, assuming of course that is where you fall in. I am just trying to explain the process.
If after the pre-read you are invited for an overnight, that is a great sign that admissions signed off on you.
NESCAC sports recruiting is 95% done in Early Decision so be aware of that.
Now back to your question, I would say 9 of the 11 schools are so highly regarded that you will do well in financial services whether it is banking, hedge funds, private equity or traditional asset management. You will have a big edge with these schools in terms of grad school for sure. One thing you do not need is a business major. Econ or Math paired with English or Science is better.
As a parent and a person who spent over 25 years in financial services, please don’t listen to others your age about financial service careers and which schools are “feeders” because it focuses on a few big companies. There are “wall street” companies all over the country and many prefer the kids coming out of the elite liberal arts colleges, which are essentially the Top 25. The most exciting are the smaller ones where your quality of life and earnings potential are far higher than a few banks in NY.
Investment banking seems to have been added to doctor and lawyer as common high school dreams, probably because finance has taken a larger share of the economy in recent years.
@ucbalumnus Yes because of movies and other media. Many students are not aware of the other opportunities with companies that are colloquially referred to as “wall street”.
Students that major in biology, environmental science and electrical engineering that can write well and present well get very lucrative jobs in finance, especially in private equity and asset management because they need people that know these fields. Finance is 8th grade math, I wouldn’t spend a plug nickel on that major, let alone spend four years studying it.
They have to come from the right schools though to get a toe in those fields.
@m4tt0201 good stats and with swimming you have wonderful chances. Without swimming you could be rejected or waitlisted by 9 of the NESCACS, seriously.
@2019Parent , if I attended a LAC planning to go into finance, I would not have business be the focus of my college experience. One of the reasons that LACs are so appealing to me is because they provide a meaningful education and the opportunity to try a variety of things.
Exactly right…and your strategy of being a bigger athletic fish in a smaller pond is a good one too. Except for Hamilton, all those schools are close together and have great rivalries. It gives you a big edge with admissions in schools were admissions outcomes can leave a top student wondering what happened.
By July-August you will have a clearer picture of where to apply ED. NESCAC does not allow schools to issue likely letters so when you visit with the coach just verify his or her preread request says “proceed with recruiting” or “safe to recruit”. You get one shot at ED. That is a key point.
The top five teams are Williams, Amherst, Connecticut College, Tufts and Bates. Williams has dominated for a while. CC is a good school but the other four are outstanding schools.
I know of both an Amherst student and a Holy Cross student who got summer internships on Wall Street while they were undergrads. One graduated and is now working in IB on Wall Street and the other will be working for a second summer as a securities analyst. They were both recruited basketball players and I believe both economics majors.
It depends how you define Wall Street. Do you mean a financial industry job, or do you mean working as a trader or I banker at Goldman, Morgan Stanley and firms of that ilk?
OP - I am the one that asked how you knew you wanted to work on Wall Street - I think you gave a good answer. Glad to see you have a good reason and it’s not just because of the money.
Just as a talking point - I know someone from the University of Alabama that has an internship with Goldman this summer. So, my point is…be at the top of your class and get involved in meaningful extracurriculars (which could be hard with swimming) and you could get there from many different schools.
Too much credit given to prestige. According to this survey published in January '15, geography matters more than anything. Companies tend to recruit from surrounding schools, so SV companies recruit mostly from CA schools, Amazon/Microsoft from WA schools and Investment banks from schools near NYC. As someone else pointed out though, large companies generally recruit top students from all over.
One interesting note: for the most part Investment banks and IT firms recruit from 2 different groups of schools. The only 2 schools that appear on both Goldman and Google’s lists are Cornell and Harvard, in that order.
Doesn’t look like the survey differentiated between front office and back office jobs though. I considered enrolling at Baruch College because of the alumni at J.P. Morgan but then I discovered that Baruch is only a feeder for back office jobs. Prestige doesn’t matter for BO jobs but it definitely does for FO ones.
@m4tt0201 Are you sure you want to work on Wall Street? Charlotte, Chicago, SF, Houston, and, to a lesser extent, LA, all have IB opportunities too.
Fair point. However your list doesn’t differentiate between front and back office either. The footnote at the bottom says it’s only a list of interviews granted in comparison with other top 50 schools, actual % per school is much lower in reality. It also does not equal actual recruits. The list I posted is based on actual recruits. Also the list for Goldman Sachs that I posted hardly looks like they are for back office type work.
Doesn’t JP Morgan also have a large retail bank operation (Chase)? Retail bank branch hiring may be much less school-prestige-conscious than the investment banking jobs that people are enamored with.
Of the LACs you mentioned, I know more Williams grads who are working in banking or at hedge funds than Amherst grades but that’s just the small sample size of my acquaintances in NYC. I know two people who transferred from Amherst to Columbia and are working on Wall Street. Columbia is big for working in the financial industry. Huge recruiting season there.
