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Undergraduate School Advice

karol

Joined
4/27/16
Messages
2
Points
11
Hi,

I'm currently a senior in high school deciding on which college to attend. I think I want to major in mathematics or computer science because I have taken some higher level math classes ie diffeq and linear algebra, that I enjoyed. I have narrowed my choices down to two schools: Harvey Mudd College and Cornell University (College of Engineering). Of these two schools which is better in terms of being able to get a job in quantitative trading? I know D.E. Shaw and Citadel recruit at Harvey Mudd and Jane Street recruits at Cornell, but I have not been able to get a list of all the companies that recruit at HMC or Cornell. Does either school see a significantly larger portion of their undergrads go in trading or get a lot more recruiters from quant firms?

Thanks for your help
 
All things equal, I would say Cornell. Very strong alumni network on Wall Street, close-ish to NYC (they even run a bus from campus to Manhattan, and Cornell has/will have satellite campuses in the city for the MFE/Engineering).

Granted, I know very little about Harvey Mudd other than the fact that I know it is a very highly regarded engineering school.

You'll likely have more competition at Cornell, simply because of more people applying for Wall Street jobs, whereas at Harvey Mudd, I get the feeling that it will be the exception rather than the norm.

By the way, if a firm recruits at Harvey Mudd, it almost certainly also recruits at Cornell.

Don't think too seriously about stuff that will happen 4 years down the line. You may find that you hate math/CS once you get to college.
 
Unless you are able to get into MIT/Caltech you are not guaranteed a job at any of the top Quant Firms right out of Undergrad. Harvey/Cornell are decent engineering schools and doesn't have the same effect that signals you are an exceptional material rightly so.. The people who are recruited from Cornell/Mudd are students outperforming their peers with consistently high GPA & rigor of academics not by the virtue of being in Cornell/Harvey mudd per se.

The question you need to be struggling with is how can I be in the top 5% of my class and gaming for that.





karol said:
Hi,

I'm currently a senior in high school deciding on which college to attend. I think I want to major in mathematics or computer science because I have taken some higher level math classes ie diffeq and linear algebra, that I enjoyed. I have narrowed my choices down to two schools: Harvey Mudd College and Cornell University (College of Engineering). Of these two schools which is better in terms of being able to get a job in quantitative trading? I know D.E. Shaw and Citadel recruit at Harvey Mudd and Jane Street recruits at Cornell, but I have not been able to get a list of all the companies that recruit at HMC or Cornell. Does either school see a significantly larger portion of their undergrads go in trading or get a lot more recruiters from quant firms?

Thanks for your help
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