Saw this on another board. Food for thoughts.
This is a mail I received from an existing Columbia student when I contacted him. Doesn't sound good people.
1) What has the placement been like this year ? How much help does Columbia provide in terms of career aid ? Does the presence of both FE and OR student hamper placements ? How easy it is to use recruitment agencies to try for jobs ?
Placements have been extremely bad! Out of 60 students hardly 8-9 have jobs and most of them are in IT that also because these students did there undergrad in Computer Science. Other are planning to get their degrees extended and pass out in Dec-09 but for that also you need some summer internship and even they are extremely difficult to find.
Here FE batch primarily comprises of three main communities Indians, Chinese and French. Indians and the Chinese are the ones who struggle for placements because of huge debt and visa issues; The french can always go back to London and many of them already have offers before coming to Columbia so it's really easy to play with the placement stats of Columbia. Columbia provides ABSOLUTELY no career aid!
Forget about OR there are 3-4 other grad programs which are run in parallel to FE and OR, all of them are competing for these financial sector jobs. So its like 300 resumes going for one position, and there 1st filter any recruiter applies is that of CGPA and because FE program is very competitive people don?t have very good GPAs. Also the career services provided by Columbia University (outside department) are primarily for Undergrads so you have to rely on you network and placement consultants to find jobs. Recruitment Agencies have been helpful in past but they are going to entertain your resumes only during the last 1-2 months of your graduation.
Berkeley and
CMU placements are in the hands of their business schools so they have far better career services. Don?t expect same kind of services in Columbia and don?t extrapolate their placement stats. Apart from Berkeley and
CMU all other good FE programs share same problems in terns of career services.
2) How is the program ? Are faculty people like Derman approachable and of any help in terms of recruitment ? How are the courses and classes in > general ?
Learning wise program is awesome and profs are really nice. Course is not easy for sure. But in the end you are making a 65K (equal to MBA fees for 1 yr) investment and you need to have a job!
3) Lastly, would you have any information regarding the number of people being accepted this year to the FE program ?
I don?t have any idea about this.
Please share this info with other people who are considering Columbia for FE. And ask to contact any us in case they have some queries. I am writing this mail in a hurry so there may be many typos.
