Alpha Sigma Buyout

In a field as competitive as finance, you might assume that only the hardest working students, those unable to make this Friday’s kegger, would be considered for coveted entry-level jobs. But according to new research from Harvard Business School, you’d be wrong.

Pian Shu, a business professor at Harvard University, analyzed data on students who earned bachelor’s degrees at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), in order to compare the academic achievement of students who entered finance versus students who went into science and engineering. The working paper (“Are the ‘Best and Brightest’ Going into Finance?”) found that students who went into finance had significantly lower grades and took significantly fewer courses than students who went into the sciences. Wait, it gets better.

The study also looked at the graduates’ high school and college extracurricular activities, and found that finance-focused grads were much more likely to be involved in varsity sports, fraternities and sororities than those in the sciences, who gravitated instead to clubs and the performing arts. Translation: Finance folks are jocks, and science aficionados are the nerds, as the cliché goes.

Of course, the study only focuses on one school (and a science-centric school at that), but it offers some food for thought for finance recruiters. An applicant with a background in physics or chemistry might not seem like the right fit, but every bully needs its counterpart nerd.