Reasonablyterrified

I applied to a couple of schools. From what I know: Harvard, the curriculum is "leadership" based. CMU, the curriculum is "empircal evidence" based. Harris, the curriculum is "economics" based. I like Harris for that. Also consider what you want to do after school. Goldman is a ton of bay area not for profits. Anything around DC is going to end up in DC, I've heard Georgetown is a ton of networking. Chicago is making efforts to expand it's recruiting options. There's already a big midwestern draw, they're working on more DC and more private sector from what I can see. It's a great school for a lot of people, but a lot of the quanty stuff is total BS with no real world application. That said I don't know how many programs offer ANY real world education. My main gripe is they decided to do a major overhaul midyear. They are supposed to send out a list of who to contact for what next week. So for the first month and half of 2015 most students had little to no idea who to go to for registration, financial, student organization, whatever, needs. That's frustrating and short sighted. I will say 100% that once Harris implements these new changes (big pushes on career development, academic advising, alumni, and growth), coupled with a new building (which is a done deal), I think it's going to be in competition for being THE premier program in the country. Unfortunately you will not reap the benefits of any of this while you're here.

As someone in the home stretch on my MPP I figured I'd weigh in and give my opinion of my time at UChicago before people made their final decisions. I've enjoyed my time here, but there are a few things I wish I'd know. This curriculum is needlessly quatatative. I like the econ focus, but some classes involve mathematic functions that make little sense and have zero real world value. The school is in the process of overhauling a mandatory "Decisions and Organizations" class partially due to student complaints over the math focus resulting in little real world value. The school is undergoing a major overhaul. This is a good thing. If you start there in the fall of 2015 you won't really reap the benefits of this overhaul. The career office has been drastically changed due to abismal placement numbers at graduation the last few years. The school has hired new staff to help solve this, but it's going to take a few years to get this enterprise up and running (I had a recruiter at a consulting firm tell me their company was aware of Harris' poor quality career office). The school is having trouble piggy-backing off of UChicago's grad-school on campus recruiting. Many of us have tried to us the regular UChicago career office to find placement (due to Harris' career office lacking), this is a difficult situation at best. You can get a great job from here, but you need to network for it. Admissions and student services is also going a major overhaul. Many posistions have been eliminated or re-organized in the front office. The results of this are currently unknown (we will see), but the school deciding to do this in the middle of a school year has provided all Harris students with a total lack of continuity for many student services. It will take time for the school to determine who is responsible for what services. If I had the option, I wouldn't attend a school during it's "trial and error" stage of management. We are getting a new building, you won't see it unless you enroll later in this decade. I'm happy I came to Harris, but had some of my other options worked out, I would have taken them, and I feel like I would be better off. Hope this gives someone a better layout.

Don't sweat it. I promise if you don't get into Harris it isn't the end of the world.

No worries on this, the dean of admissions said if your scores are good enough, no one will probably ever really look at your essays.

If you have a car it really doesn't matter. Walking home at night will probably offer you fun and exciting opportunites to meet new people!

So I've spoken to the dean of students. His general opinion is that he will waitlist students who are on the fence to see how bad they want it. If a waitlisted student emails and calls in order to show interest, it can increase their chance of getting in.

Honestly as a current Harris student, I really encourage everyone here to evaluate their own goals. If a quant-y posistion isn't the goal, please save yourselfe the brain damage and consider other schools.

The rating agencies come and recruit at the school, the big guys (Morningstar, S&P, Fitch, Moodys), all have offices in Chicago, so it isn't incredibly hard to get noticed there. Everything I've gotten in banking was through contacts from my network or from simply reaching out to local companies (a lot of Harris and/or UChicago alums are in the Chicago area obviously). Recruiters do come through, but the school doesn't do a great job of maintaining a Harris network (in my opinion). We are seeing turnover in the career office as I mentioned earlier, I don't know what the long term impact of this will be. As for the core, well...it's the University of Chicago, you're going to get economics. Both of the econ professors I've had are world class. Statistics are fine, I'm probably not going to really like those classes either way, and like I said our class got a substitute for Stats 2 (who is an accomplished statistician, but that didn't translate into being a great teacher in my opinion). Then come these weird classes that have no value to anyone except PhD's. Game theory and game theory 2 (they aren't called these, but it's what they amount to). Really hard and useless math that has no real world value. For Political Economy (game theory), the professor gives you the "book" in .pdf form (it isn't published) and told our class we would get extra credit for every typo we found. I'm not kidding, he asked us to copy edit our own text books (small aside: I think he lied about the extra credit for finding typos because I don't believe anyone got any). This is an embarrasment in my opinion. I'm going to be able to accomplish what I came to school for, and my career goals pay enough to make the finanical difference less important, but I think I'm going to be really glad to get out of here, which is too bad for a grad school experience. I should say i really like a lot of my fellow students and we do have a lot of fun when we aren't in crunch time, I just wish I felt like more of the courses I am being forced to take were relevant to anyone's career aspirations.

So Goldman tends to be geared towards not-for-profits (at least when I looked at their career area it looked like most of their graduates went that way). Harris does a ton of economics work so we have a lot leave here and go into Econ fields (banking, IMF, ratings agencies, etc.). That's the reason I came here, because these fields are what I'm interested in. As for money, Harris isn't very generous, so I received very little. My desired careers all pay $6 figures, so debt isn't as scary as if I wanted to do MFP work. Harvard is less quant-y, and seems to produce better career results in what I'm interested in.

Used this board a lot when I was looking at schools etc. I applied to several schools, got into 4, and ended up at Harris. I'm happy to talk about Harris as a whole, but first I'd like to lay out some basics for everyone: Jobs: I've had an interview with a large investment bank (public finance), a ratings agency, and two municipal finance advisory firms (one of whom I'll be with this summer). As a whole career services here is pretty bad. They've had turnover and have made new hires to rectify the situation, unfortunately, it will be a year or two before they likely see results. Classes: The core here is a joke, not in how easy it is (it's pretty hard), but in what skills it actually teaches you. Econ and Econ 2 are great (universally respected). Stats and Stats 2 are fine (we had a fill in prof for Stats 2 that wasn't great, but the full time is supposed to be better. Then comes the weird ones. Public Economy is scientology. I'm only partially kidding. Complicated math equations to determine the optimal amount of effort a mechanic should make based upon quantifying his effort and rewards (not monetary, actually quantifying effort). Political Institutions isn't hard if you've done A.P. U.S Government in high school. Decisions and Organizations is another extremely hard management class that only PhD students will ever use again. If you're good at game theory (which has little real world application), you'll get by Political Econ and Decisions and Organizations. If you aren't...well... Staff: Very good, well respected. I'm extremely happy with how many have offered to write recommendations for me. Very intelligent and accomplished as a whole. A one year student here took a total of 9 classes and had two taught by Nobel Prize winners. I would take classes again with 75% of the professors I've had SPECIFICALLY to have them as professors. Facilities: Our school has 5 classrooms and one lecture hall. I've taken Harris courses that were held in the Law School, the Chemistry labs, and the Social Sciences school. I've seen Heinz, Goldman, and Kennedy. None of them are great (Kennedy is probably best). Would I do it again...probably not. If I got into Harvard, I woulda gone there...wish I had. I wouldn't have liked Goldman. CMU is an interesting alternative. Oh well, I'm going to graduate and be just fine from here. I'll ad more later, especially should anyone have questions.

Previous Schools Tulane BSM Previous Work Experience 8 Mostly in finance/banking Math/Econ Background: Calculus, Micro, Macro, Finance Intended Field of Study in Grad School: Economic Theory Long Term Professional Goals: Development bank or international organization Schools Applied to & Results: Harvard (rejected), Georgetown (waitlist), Berkeley (rejected), Chicago (accepted), Carnegie Mellon (accepted), Texas (rejected), George Washington (accepted), UPenn (rejected), Yale (rejected). Ultimate Decision & Why: Chicago. Great school and school ranking, great city to live in, hoping the strong economic focus of the program helps get me towards my final goals.

Previous Schools Tulane BSM Previous Work Experience 8 Mostly in finance/banking Math/Econ Background: Calculus, Micro, Macro, Finance Intended Field of Study in Grad School: Economic Theory Long Term Professional Goals: Development bank or international organization Schools Applied to & Results: Harvard (rejected), Georgetown (waitlist), Berkeley (rejected), Chicago (accepted), Carnegie Mellon (accepted), Texas (rejected), George Washington (accepted), UPenn (rejected), Yale (rejected). Ultimate Decision & Why: Chicago. Great school and school ranking, great city to live in, hoping the strong economic focus of the program helps get me towards my final goals.

Actually most of the bigger firms will pay for a portion of an MBA, so if you were hired (especially as a associate consultant) you may be able to parlay it into a highly subsidized MBA as well.

So I spoke with a friend of mine who went through the law school version of this. He told me that it's common for students to pull this move. For example I told him I got in to CMU with a solid scholarship offer and that I got into GW with no scholarship at all. He pointed out that if there's a difference between school rankings that's pretty large (top 10 school v. #20) it's totally normal to have a discussion along the lines of "I'd really like to come to your school for reasons A, B, C, but the money is important and I'm staring at several competative options, can you do any better for me? He advised to honestly keeping it limited to your top choice (2 at THE MOST). It's still a low percentage shot, but worth the conversation.

I didn't get in, oh well, I'm not blown away by this one. I'm starting to narrow down choices. Still waiting on Georgetown, it's my only real contender still out there. Congrats to everyone that did get in.