The top schools for techs wanting to work on Wall Street
Financial services firms might be increasingly losing out on the best and brightest new technology talent to new media and tech start-up companies, but they’re still targeting the same elite band of schools.
Wall Street & Technology polled executives working in capital markets on their favored universities to recruit IT talent. The list is doubly interesting because of its candor – most recruiters in financial services profess a lack of preference to any particular schools or degrees when hiring graduates.
In no particular order, here are the five preferred schools:
- Carnegie Mellon University
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
- Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
- Stanford University
- Georgia Institute of Technology
Brown University, Rice University, Stevens Institute of Technology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, University of Pennsylvania and Yale University were also highlighted.
Respondents to WS&T spoke of “communication skills,” “influence management” and even the ability to be “humble.”
As Ian Scott, IT manager, fixed income at BNP Paribas, told us: “A successful IT professional will be self-motivated, organized and thorough, possessing strong analytical and logical skills. They will want to learn and be able to apply experiences to their work. They will be innovative but cost-aware, autonomous but collaborative: somebody that we can easily work alongside.”
In other words, despite the gravitation of tech talent away from the financial sector, banks still expect a lot from their potential recruits.
