Undergraduates in engineering receive job offers from financial firms.

[sakky]

<p>

Exxagerations. Take a look at the UCB graduate surveys, from EECS for instance.</p>

<p><a href=“https://career.berkeley.edu/Major/EECS.stm[/url]”>https://career.berkeley.edu/Major/EECS.stm&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>or CS:</p>

<p><a href=“https://career.berkeley.edu/Major/CompSci.stm[/url]”>https://career.berkeley.edu/Major/CompSci.stm&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>There’s a few financial sector employers in those lists. They hired for programming jobs, not investment banking.</p>

<p>As I told you, a few firms like to make a big deal that they employ a few engineers, but engineers going into investment banking straight out of school is not widespread. That you can’t find any from the UCB graduation survey

</p>

<p>Well, as regrettable as it is to say, the fact is, Berkeley is not really considered an ‘elite’ recruiting ground for investment banking in the way that MIT and Stanford (and certainly the Ivies) are. What impressed (and shocked) me was that, during the boom, nearly half of all MIT graduates who entered the workforce took positions in finance (or consulting), and even after the crash, about a third continued to do so. </p>

<p>But to your point, I agree that on an absolute scale, not many engineering students join finance. After all, the nation does grant tens of thousands of engineering bachelor’s degrees every year - the vast majority from no-name schools. The real problem is that the very best engineering students are disproportionately drawn to finance, that is, those students who come from the very best engineering schools (i.e. MIT) and who have the highest grades. </p>

<p>If the finance industry was drawing the 2.0 GPA engineering students from 4th tier schools, then it probably wouldn’t matter. After all, they probably weren’t going to be top engineers anyway. The problem is that the finance industry tends to draw from the very best of the engineering talent pool.</p>