They probably would not hire you OVER a Wharton kid...depending on your GPAs. But, you would most likely be hired over UChicago, Columbia, Brown, or Duke kids.

You can study "ceramics" at UPenn and easily break into IB.

Note that, if you are accepted into and attend UPenn CAS depending on your performance your first year, you can apply to internally transfer to Wharton. But you will definitely need a GPA as close to 4.0 as possible.

I am assuming you're a High School senior deciding on Colleges. Of all the Universities you mentioned, only Columbia>UPenn CAS. That said, it's not that hard to transfer into Wharton from the CAS. If you got into both UPenn and Columbia, it's your call. However, if I were in your shoes, I would choose Columbia. The ability to do school year internships is hard to beat.

Transferring into Wharton from CAS (or SEAS) is no longer based purely on GPA but also on the rigor of the classes you took (and if you took any Wharton classes while in CAS) in addition to your essays, so CAS students with ~3.6 were able to transfer into Wharton this past year over people who had 3.9s (of course 3.9 with hard courses would probably do well).

While it's definitely easier to get ib interviews being in Wharton than CAS, a lot of it depends on your past internships (if in finance, chances go way up) and they do interview CAS people. While I don't actually know that many econ majors interested in IB (who didn't transfer to Wharton), one of my friends who fits that profile will be doing IB at a BB this summer.

But basically, you should just apply to Wharton if you want to go to Wharton. There's too much of this "apply to CAS with the intention of transferring into Wharton"...doesn't work out too well most of the time. And you could discover that you don't want to do IB. Shitty hours...I personally never understood the draw (yay S&T =D)

To be honest..it is true that they will be coming for Wharton kids, but thats not to say you can't get in on the OCR with a little extra networking. I come from a school with an undergraduate business school that has many banks come on campus for recruiting. Coming from liberal arts background, I just did some extra networking and utilized the OCR. It can be done.

bcf: I disagree completely. Everyone networks, yes, everyone drives too, but clearly some are better than others. So you can't make a blanket statement like that. Secondly, not everyone knows what ehy want to do coming into college, and the banks recognize that. And you can take basic intro wharton courses as a non-wharton student. Yes being from WHarton si easier, but being in the college does not preclude you access to IB/mgmt consulting jobs. And the OCR, at least when I was there, was the same. I don't think they kept Wharton OCR separate from non-Wharton OCR. That also being said, college students should be leveraging alums too to get in the door, and not jsut OCR since that's a shit show.

@socola, I agree completely with what you're saying. My point was just that the likelihood of getting interviews, especially in OCR, would be much higher with Wharton than CAS (and if the guy comes in knowing he wants to do IB, it doesn't necessarily make sense for him to come in doing econ--it's different than RAMBO's situation). It's also possible to get none either way...as you pointed out, OCR is a shit show.

Tiers of IB recruiting:

- Harvard / Penn-Wharton

- Stanford / Princeton

- Columbia / Yale / MIT-Sloan

- Penn-College / Dartmouth / Cornell-AEM / NYU-Stern / UCB-Haas / Duke / Northwestern / UChicago

- UVA-Mcintyre / UMich-Ross / Williams / Georgetown / Brown

- The rest

I'm a high school senior as well looking at several colleges. If I had the opportunity, I would definitely choose Columbia over Penn CAS, unless you're looking to transfer into Wharton after a few years. I sometimes feel as if it would be better to be an Econ major at Columbia (same footing as everyone else at Columbia) than to be CAS at Penn. However, from what I've seen through my college research there is no shortage of Penn CAS kids working in finance. If you look at the Philosophy, Politics and Economics department at Penn there is a guy who left Penn to work directly for Soros.

I suppose it comes down to the campus and internal transfer opps. Either way you should have no problems breaking into IB. Just worry about getting in first..

I disagree where you placed Columbia as well as Penn- College...by no means is Penn-college on the same level of finance recruiting as NYU-Stern (there is a reason Stern is #2 in finance rankings). Also, while stanford mba is good for bankings jobs, undergrads rarely come out to new york, and their overall prescense is weak on the east coast.

Nope. That is pretty much the most accurate ranking one can get. I was accepted and researched all three (Columbia, Penn, and NYU Stern). Penn's College has placed students at Bain Capital and Soros straight out of undergrad. In addition, all the BBs take students from it and several of the elite boutiques (Blackstone in several years, Lazard every year). Add to that the fact that all three of MBB recruit at least three each, and Penn is hands down a much better option than NYU Stern. Not saying Stern is bad, but that Penn overall has more opportunities, and in IB has the same tier recruiting. Columbia is a notch above the two in the sense that, percentage-wise, it places more in FO roles than the other two.

I was referring to undergrad. Following your logic all the rankings that place NYU Stern as second for finance behind Wharton are wrong? When I was interviewing I didnt meet any CAS students, i did meet quite a few from Stern. Columbia is not even on the board when it comes to undergrad IB jobs, when compared to Wharton or Stern.

youre allowed to apply to both: Huntsman Program. And for WHarton/Eng - Jerome Fisher M&T, my alma mater program.