Master's degree but no full-time work experience. Where to start?

[EspressoLover]

> By the way, UPenn and Harvard do not have strong CS programs



I don't disagree, but that's more relevant for a PhD than a Bachelors. General prestige school prestige matters much more than specific department strength at the undergraduate recruiting level. A CS major from Harvard is at least at order of magnitude more likely to get a front-office quant-ish job at Goldman or Citadel than a CS major from UIUC.



> [Y]ou don't usually take non-Wharton classes at Penn because of constraints about elective coursework and credit.



On this point, I think you're misinformed. Many Penn undergrads dual-major across the Wharton and Engineering schools (including Stats/CS) and graduate in four years.

[a路径积分]

> On this point, I think you're misinformed. Many Penn undergrads dual-major across the Wharton and Engineering schools (including Stats/CS) and graduate in four years.



Fair enough, I was under the impression you were referring to Wharton MBAs.



> A CS major from Harvard is at least at order of magnitude more likely to get a front-office quant-ish job at Goldman or Citadel than a CS major from UIUC.



However, this statement is only true if you're talking about a firm such as GOOG, DB, IMC, Jane St or HRT - not GS or Citadel.



Conditioned on being a CS college grad who is working at Citadel, the individual is around twice as likely to be from UIUC than from Harvard.



Granted that (1) the CS undergrad program is about 2-3x as large as Harvard's depending on the year in the last 3 years and (2) there's substantial self-selection - I don't know about the UIUC crowd but the Harvard crowd is much warmer towards Google and SV startups than Citadel or Goldman. But with these numbers an educated guess is that conditioned on being a Harvard CS college grad who is applying to Citadel, you are just nearly as likely to accepted as a UIUC CS grad who is applying to Citadel. Certainly not an order of magnitude in difference.



I estimate there's nearly 5-8x as many Harvard grads at Goldman than UIUC grads, however. This is largely driven by the fact that, conditioned on being at a front office job at Goldman, you're more likely to have studied finance than CS, or economics than CS. And economics is the most popular concentration at Harvard by far, whereas UIUC grads mostly choose to major in some form of engineering. Also, CS is still a rather small program at Harvard despite its recent growth (probably due to the pizza allure of CS50), these numbers are driven more by the AM bunch than CS.



> I don't disagree, but that's more relevant for a PhD than a Bachelors.



Inevitably, some high school student will find this thread on Google when he or she's deciding whether to go to Harvard or MIT and I have to clarify my points.



Now on the contrary, while Harvard doesn't have a strong CS program, I actually recommend studying CS at Harvard whether as an undergraduate or grad student as strongly as any of the top 10 'commonly ranked' programs if you want to make a career of CS.



Harvard's alumni network in academic CS is probably second only to MIT's, and the faculty to student ratio is several times better than, say, MIT's. Odyssey is years ahead of MIT's HPC resources and running test cases on a dedicated SB quad socket machine with 1.5 TB memory is something you likely won't get to do at MIT. (This still doesn't mean it's a strong program or a large department, though.) Now, if you're optimizing for sex life or living community though, you should probably consider MIT. And of course, to credit the valid part of EspressoLover's post, you should base college choice largely on the people and college on a whole, not your department.

[goldorak]

Reminder to self: do not send your daughter studying in the US. There, they really think you actually learn things at school. Strange country.

[MCgeneratedname]

oh... American. Then forget everything I said Wink

The situation here is different due to an over-supply of PhDs.



Reminder to self: Ask goldorak if he is willing to home school my children.

[Lebowski]

Not to thread jack, but since there are a couple folks who are directly involved in hiring on here and the conversation has shifted, I thought I'd ask. Do recruiters really care about the strength of departs so much for undergrads or does the strength of school carry more weight in your mind? I've always imagined that the strength of the department applied more to research and graduate studies.



I don't doubt that you're 2x as likely to be from UIUC than Harvard at Citadel or 8x as likely to be from Harvard at GS, but I also feel like once you attach a certain level of name brand to yourself--say like top 10 or top 25 US News undergrad rankings--what you do in an interview and where you actually want to work is probably a much stronger indicator of what job you'll get than the actual name of the school. That doesn't invalidate any of the above statements, it just merely adds that companies care about how you do in interviews and students have free will...not necessarily groundbreaking information.

[goldorak]

@MC. I have a baby sitting business. I lazily called it the "the baby turtle traders". You are free to apply. Babies who already got a degree in economics or/and floaties for swimming are not considered as I tend to consider them as definitely lost to the dark side.

[sv507]

@riane, there is a kaggle winton capital challenge.. maybe that would be something you could try your hand at and if you do well on the public leaderboard use it on your cv

[mtsm]

thanks for pointing this out. very interesting and how ridiculous their blurb on the kaggle page is...

[mtsm]

@goldorak: very funny you say that about the US, because it's so much more true about Europe in general

[a路径积分]

> Do recruiters really care about the strength of departs so much for undergrads or does the strength of school carry more weight in your mind? I've always imagined that the strength of the department applied more to research and graduate studies.



I cannot speak for all companies. It varies from shop to shop. But here's the way I see it.



Regarding campus recruiting, our recruiters have to maximize their ROI so they plot a roadmap that inevitably passes only through universities that have produced good interview hit rates in the past; this strongly biases the % hired to the 'top-ranked' (whatever this means) schools, since only these schools get to hear the name, but this doesn't mean that coming from a 'top-ranked' school brings any edge at all given that you have applied.



We don't distinguish between schools during the resume review.



One primary reason is that for a competitive position, we are looking for reasons not to reject rather than reasons to accept. We pick on the strongest signals and don't have the time to see which school you're from, and it's easy to meet sufficient condition to reject even without knowing which school you're from.



Now, people say that recruiting is a crapshoot and that my way of approach of filtering resumes is BS... This claim confounds two parts.



Empirically I have a 80+% accuracy at predicting which resumes don't clear round 1 interview even if I had passed all of them through. This part's easy.



Now the actual part that we find hard: What I, and presumably most recruiters, have no idea how to predict is how well a person will perform at the job given that he has passed through all the rounds and we have certain qualitative gauge on his interview performance. This doesn't mean that resume review is poor executed.