Sometimes a business student comes out of their undergrad and finds that all the golden doors of the private sector remain closed. As they bang their fists, and think indignantly that they have jumped through the hoops, passed the tests, and achieved the grade - why aren't the best employers hiring me?
Maybe its the economy, we are in the bottom of the trough and they aren't hiring anybody. Maybe today's BComm is yesterday's high school diploma and we all need to upgrade to masters and PhD's before the job market opens. Maybe you aren't supposed to work high finance after your undergrad but instead toil away in high tech or at a rental car desk. Perhaps although your school taught you enough to walk the talk, it failed to line up that all important recruitment meeting in your 4th year.
Regardless of what happened, top students seem to do one of 3 things. They upgrade their degree with a specialized masters degree, lower their sights and get ready to plug some time at a mid level job, or take the whole situation as a sign to enjoy their youth and go to Europe. I went to school.
The trouble with choosing to go to school is you need to make the choice in the summer between 3rd and 4th year so you can prep for the GMAT. Unfortunately I had decided to finally get a real summer job and load up on experience, and so instead of spending my days in the sun with clients I needed to plug some serious hours into an internship. Drop 2 classes of TAing on top, plus weekend work with the old employer and there's no time to chug GMAT math questions. So for 3 weeks in September I ignored my classes and plowed as much time as I could into relearning how to do high school math by hand. This hack-kneed self prep only set me up for one thing - dissapointment. So when November came along I slapped my 660 GMAT score on my applications and readied myself for top 20-30 b-schools.
I figured because I had paid attention during my undergrad I should be painfully well equipped for the material offered - these programs pull 80% of their students from non-BComm backgrounds after-all. So although getting top education is a priority, it's not the number 1 issue; I needed a school with brand.
The top tranche usually don't offer MSc degrees and they require 3+ years of work experience. So even without a 700+ GMAT score I'm not going to LSE unless I want to be a financial engineer. So after trimming down to schools that even offered degrees for students straight from undergrad I needed to look for a school that A)was known as a very strong Finance school and B)was a recruitment center for capital market analyst positions in the top firms. I need a stamp on my head that says "high quality | employable", maybe one of these schools could give me that.
BComm-Finance students don't do a Masters of Science in Finance to learn finance, they do it to get a job. And it works out perfectly. You enter this one year super accelerated program in the summer. While acing the foundation finance courses though August, you network your butt off with anyone you can pull a phone call from through your family, undergrad network, and newly established grad network. September recruitment opens up for Analysts and Associates; they usually hire Analysts first. Now you are pushing your b-school tooled up resume that says MSF instead of BCOMM to analyst jobs that typically go to the top undergrad students from the top universities. Better yet, because its September you get to drop that first quarter 3.9 GPA onto to the page. You look like a rock-star candidate; Masters student from a high quality finance school that is rocking great grades and is willing to start out as an Analyst. What they don't know is that your grades are so high because all the general arts students are learning finance for the first time, pulling down the curve, and you are answering all of their interview questions with know-how you learned in your 4th year M&A class. So early in the degree you're really the mid-level BComm grad they wouldn't look at twice disguised as Ivy caliber talent.
Not everyone approaches it this way, in fact most MS students land in the direct hire cycle in the spring. A lucky few with work experience can spin their MS like an MBA and grab associate positions, and some extend their 1 year program to 1.5 years to do an internship in the summer. But I'm convinced the best route is to tackle the market as a super-undergrad candidate. If you can land the top job the year at school refining your quant skills will be more than worth it, and you still leave the door open for an MBA later on.
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