<p>is williams college a target school for bulge bracket firms (like jp morgan chase, goldman, and the likes) to do i-banking right out of undergrad? how good is the economics program at williams in the sense of preparing a person for careers like i-banking/private equity?</p>
<p>Morgan, for one, is a hotbed for Ephs. If you want to go to the Street and you have the brains and personality, the Williams connection will be quite beneficial…</p>
<p>Williams is probably the dominant Wall Street feeder among selective LAC’s.</p>
<p>Williams does send a lot of people to Wall Street. There are people on Wall Street from many other schools beyond the Ivies and Williams and Amherst as well.</p>
<p>Your major is not the key to getting a job on Wall Street; I know people who have been tremendously successful in the prestige Wall Street jobs with degrees in psychology, philosophy and chemical engineering (right out of undergrad, with no MBA’s).</p>
<p>A trader at the most prestigious firm on the Street (later to become one of their senior executives) told me that there is no educational program that truly prepares you for a job like his. </p>
<p>They seem to go for aggressive people, rather than honing in on majors or grades (although grades are not unimportant). You’ll find that many of the key positions on Wall Street are populated with athletes from elite schools.</p>
<p>I would caution any high schooler from trying to aim their life at Wall Street when they’re 15. Few people, and even fewer high school kids, understand what people on Wall Street really do. People know it is a place where big money is made, but little more than that. </p>
<p>The workers in the prestige jobs (trading and institutional sales and the frontline people in mergers and acquisitions) like the work for the pace and the excitement. Workers in the low prestige jobs such as analysts or quants or finance get paid well compared to the rest of the world, but work hellish hours, do what many people consider boring work, and are sneared upon by those in sales, trading and the leaders in M&A.</p>
<p>All jobs there come with long hours and high pressure. You need to be aggressive and often abrasive to be successful. One of my friends quit in his 30’s when the guy across the street with the same job died of a heart attack at 36.</p>
<p>I’m not saying that people shouldn’t go to work on Wall Street, but I think that choosing a college because it will give you the best chance to get into Wall Street is the wrong way to go. Chances are that most of these people aiming for Wall Street when they enter Williams won’t wind up there, and not simply because those jobs are hard to get, but more likely because they’ve decided to become doctors or lawyers or botany professors. Most kids change their minds on their majors after they arrive in college, and 20 years out of college, most people wind up working in jobs that are unrelated to their majors, especially if they are not engineering majors.</p>
<p>Choose a college because it fits you personally and because it is strong academically overall.</p>