@cinnamon1212 Trinity is a lot better than most other colleges about staying in touch, because they have the money for a full time alumni relations staffer. So they have a quarterly college magazine, regular emails (at least once a month) and frequent events (including in the US - if you’re in a city like NY/DC/SF/LA you’ll get invited to dinner with the master almost every year, that’s how they do their fundraising). And you can go back to college for a free dinner almost anytime. But I agree that it’s not on the same level as US colleges, and I would never really consider using the alumni network unless I wanted an academic job (the careers center is a university not a college function while in Cambridge)…
On the diversity front, there is lots of effort to encourage more applications from underrepresented groups (again there is a full time outreach person), but selection is strictly on academic merit, so if those groups don’t apply (for example Trinity has a relatively low population of women because fewer of them apply to do math and physics) then they will be underrepresented in the admitted class, because there are no quotas for any particular group, not even an attempt to balance by sex. And it’s not just about ethnicity, one underrepresented group is poor white boys (see https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/society/2018/jan/07/professor-green-white-working-class-boys-becoming-more-disengaged).
I agree it could be hard to be the one black student (though some like standing out and others hate the attention, and certainly more opportunities might be brought to your attention, just like if you’re a female mathematician), but (as I noted above) being Chinese-American would be more unusual for being American than for being of Chinese origin.
“You want to go to grad school in the US. Go to Duke and study abroad in Cambridge for a semester or two.”
That’s a pretty big non-sequitur. But I would absolutely advise against doing a JYA semester in Cambridge for any reason other than having a fun travel experience. It’s just a moneymaking exercise that isn’t taken seriously by undergrads who are actually attending Cambridge and pretty isolating to turn up when everyone else has bonded for 2 years already (Trinity is rich enough not to need that sort of moneymaking). There are a handful of formal academic exchange programs where you take a full year course (Trinity has one with Rice and one with UVA) but it would be pretty hard to have enough depth from two years at a US college to measure up to second or third year Cambridge undergrads who have just done one subject.
Fair point, @SJ2727, in that the Oxbridge MA only looks good on LinkedIn.
However, if the OP is aiming for a PhD in the US, they could just enter an American PhD program straight out of undergrad (and pick up a masters along the way).
Sure, but typically it would still be shorter to do the MPhil + PhD (usually 4 years total, PhD may overrun half a year or so) than the US. The difference as already noted is that it’s harder to get postgraduate funding in the UK. Anyway, bottom line is that all options will be open to OP.
On the internships - the City is great for these. I am unsure what the landscape will look like in a few years however with various Brexit-related moves out of the City. I’d still go for Cam over Duke, though.
While I agree that international rankings should be viewed with a bit of caution, they do serve as a valuable guide to gauge prestige. And prestige is an important aspect highly valued in the worlds of finance & academia.
@Publisher Prestige is definitely important. At the end of the day, OP is looking to do an MBA or PhD at a place like Harvard (specifically mentioned Cambridge, MA). Duke sends significantly more kids to Harvard Business School and I wouldn’t be surprised if it also sends more kids to Harvard’s econ PhD program.
@JenniferClint’s post highlighted that there are not insignificant differences in what prestige means at Cambridge compared to Duke (and I expect most other US universities, other than perhaps MIT or Caltech, though even there I suspect there’s more credit given for practical implementation compared to pure ideas). Prestige at Cambridge is almost entirely measured by intellectual benchmarks (Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals for example), not financial or career benchmarks (though they care slightly about how many prime ministers and kings attended). That’s the result of a purely academic merit based admission process, combined with a British reticence for talking about money. You see it in things like the competition to be Senior Wrangler in math (which Lee Hsien Loong probably regards as more of an achievement than becoming prime minister of Singapore). And the highest status as an undergraduate is usually achieved by being effortlessly brilliant, able to do all your work and get top marks without any noticeable effort.
So at a reunion no one in business would ever say where they worked, just “in the city”, whereas if they were a professor you’d get a complete career history (and perhaps a recounting of intellectual problems they’d worked on, I recall one dinner where I was told in detail by the retired fellow next to me how he solved the problem of how to predict where German submarines would be found in WW2 since it was a similar subject to my PhD). And the most boastful thing you’d ever hear at Trinity is “more Nobel Prizes than France” (sadly no longer true, if it ever was), which was and is often used in speeches by those very same Nobel Prize winners (albeit now with slightly more tongue in cheek). Another similar quote that I recall was attributed to Bertrand Russell, again recounted by one of those Nobel Prize winners was that “before I went up to Trinity I was told that I’d meet the most intelligent men in the world there. My friends and I spent the whole of our first year looking for them, and it was only in our second year that we realized we were them.”
I think this was mentioned briefly but one of the most important questions OP should answer is this:
Is OP absolutely positively committed to reading economics as the college experience? Cambridge is very different than Duke or Yale or Princeton in that way. It’s terrific for students absolutely committed to that study with no need to take classes beyond what you are studying. But sometimes taking random classes that you think may interest you turns out to be the way that a college student finds their real love – something unexpected in a subject that they may not have even been introduced to in high school.
It doesn’t yield much useful information to just say “Duke is more represented at Harvard and Wall Street than Cambridge”. Of course it is, because both are in the same country, just like Cambridge would be more represented at… um… Cambridge or Oxford, (because those are the top UK schools), and the City of London than Duke would be. What would be useful would be the data we can’t get, that is, % of Duke vs Cambridge applicants made offers at top US schools or on Wall Street.
There is no way Cambridge is going to be a less advantageous name than Duke even in the US. And this is kind of exaggerating the impact anyway, because Harvard or or MIT or wall street firms don’t just look at the name of the school you graduated from, they look at how you performed there. Bottom line is that OP will be probably equally placed on name regardless of where he goes, and what will matter is how he performs there.
There are plenty Cambridge alumni happily working at really good jobs in the US, on Wall Street and off it.
“But sometimes taking random classes that you think may interest you turns out to be the way that a college student finds their real love”. Just to note that other than the limited amount of time you have available, there is absolutely no barrier to you going to any Cambridge lecture you want to for fun (though it would be very hard to persuade the college to offer you supervisions). Its just that you can’t easily change your course mid way through. The most brilliant person I know did a second degree in philosophy just out of interest (and the college paid for it).
@SJ2727 “It doesn’t yield much useful information to just say…”. That is your opinion. I think it is highly informative.
The OP cares about working in the US and (possibly) attending HBS. I have provided information showing that Duke is likely to be the better choice considering his career plans. I did not say it was because Duke is a better school. It doesn’t matter if Duke is a better choice because it is located in the US or because it has a basketball coach named Krzyzewski. We’re talking about outcomes. Not the reasons why those outcomes are what they are.
I also never said or implied that OP couldn’t work on Wall Street after attending Cambridge. Just because X is better than Y doesn’t mean Y can’t perform adequately.
Both great schools. Although I do not know for certain, I suspect that “reading economics” at Cambridge is probably a more intense experience than studying at an elite US university (other than those with a narrow focus such as Caltech).
Certainly, the Cambridge University experience will be more focused than studying at Duke. Whether that is good or bad depends upon the OP’s mindset at this time of his life.
Since Cambridge is a three year experience & $100,000 cheaper, an option would be to return to the US for a 10 month specialty master’s degree in data analytics, finance or foundations of business. If done in this fashion, then OP could enjoy the job placement benefits of both Cambridge University and of Duke University or another elite US university if wishing to forego a career in academia.
@JenniferClint
let me illustrate what i meant with a simple example, using hypothetical numbers, why simply comparing numbers doesn’t tell you anything informative. Let’s say…
200 Duke graduates apply to Wall Street, 100 get accepted.
20 Cambridge graduates apply to Wall Street, 18 get accepted. (Obviously far fewer Cambridge graduates will have work authorization in the US so far fewer will apply.)
To say “there are 100 Duke graduates on Wall Street and only 18 from Cambridge, therefore Duke is better to get a job on Wall Street” is clearly erroneous, when Duke grads have a 50% success rate but Cam ones a 90% success rate. (and yes the numbers are hypothetical, but I trust you can figure out why I said that simply comparing absolute numbers is meaningless here.)