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3 years ago
Admissions Advice
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Accepted Answer
3 years ago

You have listed a lot of ECs but if I count off the actual ones you have completed, it's like less than 1/3rd of them. Mostly, this is a list of ideas and passions but nothing concrete that serves as evidence that you have completed them.

Finance, Computer Science, and Economics are all hard majors and it would be wise to narrow your focus rather than doing 10-15 random ECs without any of them being serious spikes.

For example, if you chose Finance, then I would work on ECs that support the narrative that you are a future Finance Major.

-Start an investment club at your HS, and get 50 members to contribute $75 and use that see money to buy some stocks and meet once a week to vote on keeping your positions or trading out of them. This will show some leadership as well if you become President of the Investment Club.

-Start a Financial Education club at your HS, and teach 9th and 10th graders about money, how to calculate interest rates, payments, find the best credit card, etc. Again this is showing some leadership opportunities if you are the President of the Financial Education club.

-Continue your Blog but be more selective and targeted about what you write about especially if you want admissions officers to look at it and evaluate it. I'd like to read about more timely stories like "What effect did COVID-19 have on the financial markets?" or "Why are rental car prices going up and up?" or "What's going to happen to all the tenants who haven't paid rent for the past 500 days?"

-All serious Wall Street professionals have a LinkedIn account and they use that to network and get job leads on internships and other gigs. So you want to do that and collect a couple of hundred connections.

-If you sign up for the Linked Professional, you can take hundreds of certificate courses for free and add them to your resume on linked in.

On your LinkedIn resume, you should show some skills like:

-Have some mastery in MS Excel and building desktop models and calculators.

-Ideally, if you can get certified in using Bloomberg or Thomson/Reuters real-time financial information products that would be good. You might have to pay for the class.

-Get certified in what the most common programming languages Quants and Financial Engineers use.

You get the idea right? It's better to have depth as well as breadth but you need to narrow your ECs, hone your spikes. Your narrative needs to support whatever you are passionate about learning in college. You can always switch majors but if you are planning on applying to Wharton or MIT, remember that these admits not only have near-perfect grades, test scores and have taken the hardest STEM classes, they also have amazing ECs.

Right now you are all over the place and that's not a good place to be. It's like you are a one-man track team and start in every event...long jump, triple jump, high jump, hurdles, shot put, 1500M, 5000M, and steeplechase all at the same time. Pick an event and be good at it.

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3 years ago

First off, it's great to see that you've given this a lot of thought and have planned ahead into your junior year! You're already ahead of the game! I'd agree with the other response here and note that narrowing things down and really honing in on your interests is definitely going to help your application stand out.

You've shared some really great ideas, but rather than trying to make one EC apply to all three majors, try focusing on one thing and excelling in it.

Hope that helps!

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Your chancing factors
Unweighted GPA: 3.7
1.0
4.0
SAT: 720 math
200
800
| 800 verbal
200
800

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