Williams college recruiting standards?

12xx SAT is very low for Williams unless you are from an under represented group or have a learning disability. Williams has a great track program but is DIII, the coach might get one or two admits in at that SAT score a year and they are going to have to be spectacular think 4:0X mile or the top of their state at their respective distance.

Trinity, Hamilton, Connecticut College these are schools where a 1200 something on your SAT might not preclude you from being admitted but those scores and your times won't cut it at Williams, Amherst, or even Middlebury. If your GPA is decent you can try Bowdoin the SAT is not required there and hasn't been for a while.

This is actually a pretty common misconception. When I was at Amazon we hired a ton of University of Washington Graduates and a fair number of folks from other PAC-12 Schools and a lot from the Big 10. Sure the Ivies and Stanford might be over-represented in Tech but so is University of Illinois, Carnegie Mellon, and a few other schools who have decent but not amazing overall reputations but have strong CS programs. You'd be surprised at how many Product Managers and Engineers at Facebook went to San Jose State and Santa Clara University. I recently hired someone from McKinsey who had gone to University of Wisconsin. Tech has always hired from a fairly broad pool of colleges but consulting was very snobby and select until recently but the last 10 years or so they've realized that the top students at nearly every flagship state University are just as strong as the typical Ivy leaguer they have traditionally hired. A lot of the silver spoon folks who go into Banking or Consulting tend to end up in sales type roles where social connections and schmoozing are important. They are balanced by more quantitative folks who just as often come from state schools as they do the Ivies. Heck until recently most Ivy League CS departments aside from Cornell were pretty average. Illinois, Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon, and UCSD blew them out of the water especially when it came to graduate students. Give me a hungry Big 10 High Honors grad with something to prove over an entitled Harvard man any day of the week and twice on Sundays.

The Data Backs this up. While Ivy leaguers are well represented at the C-suite on a % basis they don't dominate like one might think. There is in fact way more diversity at the top than I think people assume. This is from 2021 data for undergrads and doesn't include drop-outs like Zuckerberg:

SCHOOL (STATE)
NUMBER OF FORTUNE 500 CEO GRADUATES

Boston College
4
Texas A&M University

4
University of Pennsylvania
4
Dartmouth College (NH)
3
Michigan State University
2
Pennsylvania State University—University Park
2
Princeton University (NJ)
2
Stanford University (CA)
2

That's true for decent paying jobs ($150-200k range, new grad), but it's not true for the elite jobs. Few people get elite jobs (e.g. HFT/quant, PE/VC directly out of college, startups) from top schools, but you can't get them if you don't attend a top school - that's how competitive they are.

Microsoft and Amazon like UW grads, but they're both supporting their state university and getting near-top talent (UW doesn't use affirmative action, and the acceptance rate to their CS school is ~3%).

Jobs are for suckers.

Develop your expertise and your network then work for yourself

Bro said I had a learning disability XD

Hey ShowBabyYouWantIt,

Don't wonder where you fit in the college completive landscape, you can know it. Go look up results on TFRRS for ever college. See how you compare to people on campus now.

Coaches often throw out BS marks for recruitment. One college coach said he would only recruit a certain time, but I happened to know no one on his team could perform at that level and only 3 high school kids in the previous several years had that mark. If you are better then the people they have, they want you.

The best tell is to look at the conference meet for a school. If you are around the mark to get 1 point at the conference meet based on your high school times, you are in a good spot. If you'd win conference meet, your might want more competition.

At D3 like Williams, you are making an academic decision. That's probably a good choice for 99.9% of runners. You'll be a pro in something other than running.

I'd suggest you be straight up with coaches on your academics. They will know what they can get in, SAT's grades, etc. If you want academic schools like Williams, I'd suggest you do some practice tests and take another crack at the SAT. A 1300 is a lot higher than a 1290, even though its not.

That's fair, I hadn't thought about that nuance but don't disagree. Though to be fair there's a big difference from those who are in the top of their class at the Ivies, MIT, and Stanfords of the country and those who are in the middle. Those who go into the super remunerative roles right out of undergrad ten to be in the top 5% or even 2% of their class, have insanely strong quant skills. Even then outside of VC the folks who end up making the crazy bucks are a smaller subgroup who distinguish themselves in the first couple of years at the firm.

Have Dad invest the $320k on the 1st day of school and it will be $450k at graduation. The kid can pay cash for a house. But some of you think the average Williams grad will overtake the Rutgers grad at some point who had a 35 ACT and 4.0 in HS and earns am engineering degree with a 3.75 GPA and owns a house?

How much should one pay for college and is it worth it is an interesting subject? What if you used that money for grad school, fund a business, buy a house...

It seems there is no right answer because each kid is so different, as is every family. It does really depend on what you want to do. If you want to be a nurse, they pay back of going to Penn over Big State U will never be there. If you want to be an investment banker, the pay back is real.

Its also unrealistic to expect a 17 year old to know what they want to do with the rest of their life. Its frankly a flaw in our system.

If you like D3 academic schools with good running programs, give W&L a look.

I encourage kids to cast a wide net. You never know what you'll catch. Be sure you put in for some sure things, you'd be happy with.

I tell from the maturity you are showing, you are going to do well and end up with a great situation. Be mindful a 12xx is below the mix for a lot of these schools. There are kids every year that don't think they need a safety school in the apply mix and end up at JUCCO.

Dang. My high school has four (4) Fortune 500 CEO's.

Christopher Columbus (Miami, FL)

:)

compound interest is a hell of a drug. if you make $200k out of college and make about $500k just before 30, you'll make a lot more than somebody only making $200k at 30.

Agreed - you have to be insane to get it, but that's because of how lucrative they are. The average (probably ~125 IQ) student at a top school will get a good job if they work hard and are normal socially, but when you start talking about the top ~5% or higher is when you're dealing with the true geniuses.

That said, if you're slightly less smart (i.e. you don't have a literal IMO gold medal) but have social skills, you can go basically as far. Interviewers care a lot about your performance which is why the questions they ask are nearly all technical - a speed math test involving relatively high numbers, then more difficult sequences and probability - but if you appear autistic in an interview or just can't make eye contact, someone not as insanely qualified who's more sociable can get the job.

Big difference between Amazon and Jane Street. Or Google and SIG. Or Apple and KKR.

But even then, you're reaching -- 0% chance someone out of San Jose State's first job is a product manager at Facebook. In fact, it's close to -1%.

Again, second job, third job, yeah, maybe. The easiest thing to world to do is filter by school at a shorthand, and that's what they do.

I spent the bulk of my early professional life at a trading firm and can count on one hand the quant trading firms that won’t seriously consider an applicant from a strong state flagship (Cal/Michigan/UT-A/etc) who displays exceptional quantitative aptitude. None of those firms have been mentioned in this thread as of now, btw.

With PE/VC it’s more nuanced, but in the last ~5 years, funds have been rolling out what amount to early entry programs that let new college hires skip the standard 2-years in banking. I honestly don’t think these programs are orders of magnitude more competitive than a standard IB->PE/VC path (and there are merits to doing the banking stint), and are again completely accessible by smart, hardworking students from strong state flagship type schools.

Can’t speak for the startup scene, but I’d be genuinely shocked if it wasn’t similar. FAANG+ product manager roles will often pull from MBB intern classes, but those are again jobs that are completely accessible to smart students at state flagships.

TBH your post reads something I would’ve written as a college sophomore, right before my first internship recruiting season when I thought I was really hot stuff for attending a “prestigious” school. There’s little tangible difference in job opportunities available once you get to a certain strata of schools, and drive + willingness to network + prep for the recruiting cycles is more important than brand name once you’re within that range.

That's true - I didn't think about Michigan and UT Austin. That being said, however, students with truly great quant. aptitude tend to go to higher ranked schools - if they're international class, they would have done math competitions in high school and done well enough that they were accepted (and, for nearly all, they're Asian or white males - not exactly a quota filler) into a T5 or at least T10 school.

Basically, if you're at the top of the top of your class at Michigan you'll have a chance, but a student who's top of his class at a T5 college will have a better shot.

1:55/4:20 as a junior is superior, not equivalent to, 4:20 among Williams athletes, because the latter had the chance to improve as seniors. However, the SATs are too low. We had some 1200 something types (few) in my day but that was before the mean was raised in 1995, so that 1200 became more like 1320. Your SAT would have had to be bumped up this fall to make it, I think.

Did you check out the Patriot League schools. Lower level D1. Good competition level for your ability. Some schools offer scholarships. Great academic schools, Bucknell, Colgate, Lafayette, Lehigh etc.

I went to Middlebury--similar school, generally considered a tad less competitive--and while your times are super impressive, I guarantee your SAT and class rank is too low for a school of that caliber (they rejected me with a 35 ACT, top 5%).

That said, you're only a junior--retake the test and hit the books. You definitely have a shot, you'll just need to re-assign your efforts a little. Good luck to you!!