Now that January is over, I wrote to my friend Hannah at CMU (she is MSCF '08) and asked her how the internship scene has been for MSCF'08ers and from what I could gather, things are roughly the same as they were last year (the subprime crisis had not not revealed itself fully by Jan-end '07). Roughly the same proportion of the '08 class has internship offers at the end of Jan'08 as the the '07 class did at the end of Jan'07. So, it does not look like internships have been too adversely affected. Yet.
A positive sign has been the robust hiring from Lehman Brothers Asia and DB London, though DB NY has cut back a bit. Also, this time around, State Street and and RBS have dipped their toes in the water, for the first time. And so has Goldman Sachs. So, going forward, the following questions present themselves.
- Going forward, will the softness in the markets do in those who are still without offers?
- And what about internship to full-time job offer conversion percentages? Will the yield fall for this batch?
- And, of course, how are things at the other top-tier US programs? (UCB, NYU, Columbia and Stanford)
- What about the second-tier programs like Chicago, IIT, GaTech, Rutgers et al?
Perhaps some readers can shed some light into this.
2 comments:
hey, thanks for the blog, always good to see what a mfe student thinks as i am probably a future one myself.
q for you: after seeing the work environment in an i-bank, would you choose to do a top mfe again or get an mba from stanford/harvard/wharton?
i like the mfe, but i'm afraid i'll be viewed as some geek who should be stuck in a cubicle somewhere, never to be seen by management or clients. I would enjoy the mfe material more than a mba, and i like the fact the cmu/ubc mfe's are 1 year, but i'm afraid mfe's get stereotyped due to the fact that they're mostly asian science/eng. geeks as far as I can tell.
i actually have done sales to clients (in eng.), and scored in the 99th q in the verbal gmat, so i can do both math and the soft skills type jobs, but not sure which way to go, mba or mfe, since mba's cost more, take longer, and have huge classes (lots of competition), and i'm an engineer so career switching with an mba might be tough.
your thoughts?
I would stick with MSCF any day. I can do without the marketing classes bullcrap.
Not everyone knows what to do with FEs. The good ones do. They usually end up in trading roles. Or risk management. FEs with a prior quant PhD are prized as quants.
Engineers, especially with computing skills, tend to find MFEs easier than others but it is by no means easy for anyone. If you don't have prior finance industry experience, consider the 1.5 year programs.
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