UCLA is a good school. But you're an engineer who wants to do banking, and I'm not sure you get some of the rules in banking that don't apply in engineering or consulting.
At Google or Lockheed, nobody cares where you went to school. They care that you're smart and good at what you do.
In Banking and Consulting, where you went to school is your brand and your network. A Harvard MBA gives you access to more jobs and a better network than a UCLA Anderson MBA. An MIT Sloan MFin means you'll have a bunch of friends working on Wall Street. A UCLA MFE means you'll have fewer.
UCLA will help you learn business theory, but investment banking and consulting aren't all about competence like engineering is. They're about networks, connections, marketing, and politics, not about creating stuff or discovering things. (This is part of the reason I prefer being a quant, and may explain some of the tension between the quants and bankers or salespeople at a lot of firms.) But if you go this route, you're limiting yourself if you choose UCLA over, say, a Kellogg MBA.
Princeton, Columbia, MIT, maybe NYU and Cornell are great MFE programs and they would also give you good branding for consulting or banking. Carnegie Mellon and Baruch are two schools like LSE, where smart money knows you're brilliant but dumb money has never heard of them. The problem is that as a consultant or a banker, many of your clients, even your hiring managers, will be dumb money. MIT is just so much more recognizable as "OK, this guy is probably pretty darned smart" than UCLA, and that's extremely helpful for a career in banking or consulting.
Trust me, I used to think like you do about bankers and consultants. Then I started to work with bankers, and I realized that I can do better work and offer more insight than most of them could. But their value is in their connections, not in their work. So if you want to be a banker, go to the best MBA program that will accept you, with the strongest network possible, and forget about an MBA.
If you are on the fence, do one of the two MFin programs. Princeton or MIT will open most doors in the quant roles and many doors in the front office. It will give you a smaller network than an MBA program, but that network will involve a lot of people in the front office.
If you want to be a quant, do an MFE at Baruch. But from an engineer to an engineer, if you want to be a banker, forget about the expense of an MBA or its lack of difficult curriculum; just do it- go to all of the parties and events, join the clubs, go on vacations with everyone, and spend two years building a network that you can take with you to Wall Street. It looks like a mind-boggling waste of money until you realize that this is genuine social capital. Or you compromise. Princeton takes 4 semesters to teach what
CMU teaches in three semesters. So the MFins have more time to hang out with other grad students on campus, who are often going off to do pretty neat stuff in industry and academia, as well as other members of the program who are going into finance. MIT costs a bit more and the curriculum is a bit lighter, but you're part of the Sloan school and get to make friends with the MBAs as well as MFins bound for wall street and consulting.
MIT's MFin program also gets placements into consulting, too. So if you're not too old, I think it could be a really good fit for an engineer who wants to learn something but go into consulting.
Princeton costs you an extra semester to learn the same stuff as other programs teach in three semesters. MIT charges you an extra $35K on top of regular tuition at a typical program and costs you an extra summer. I would argue that for someone who wants an MFE but wants to keep his consulting or banking options open, the extra semester or $35K extra in tuition is worth it. And you can justify it to your inner accountant with the fact that you're not paying $170K for an MBA.
And with a Boeing or Lockheed on your resume, and a good enough undergrad to get into MFE programs, you're certainly in the running for a top 7 MBA (maybe not HBS or Stanford- those are always a crapshoot, but certainly Kellogg Columbia or MIT Sloan). That may very well be what you want to do.
Or maybe you want to be one of the smart bankers who can speak the language with quants. Chicago Booth gives you everything a top 7 MBA gives you (in fact, it's a top 3 MBA), and many MBAs that come out of there have this uncanny ability to understand what quants do. A few might even be able to do a quant's job with just the tools their MBA gives them.
So just keep an open mind about this. If you want a banking role, you want to aim for a better brand and a less quant-heavy program that allows more opportunities for networking.
