SMU top 20 per cent of its graduates starting pay average $5,062

[warning]

Originally Posted by Unregistered

this is correct. the CNA article mentioned the 13k fella is working in HK

can you post the link?
if the 13k includes housing allowance, that's quite reasonable for financial institutions.

Even if you don't look at the top 20%, SMU graduates' starting salary tend to outstrip their peers with similar degrees.

Let's disregard SMU's Cum Laude statistics and just look at the starting salaries of those who did not achieve Cum Laude. SMU Business Management is ranked 16 compared to NUS Business (Honours) at 22 and NTU Business at 53. Likewise, SMU Economics is ranked 10 whereas NTU Economics is ranked 44.
(Graduate Employment Survey 2010 (published 2011) | Salary.sg - Your Salary in Singapore)

This is particularly impressive given that SMU is a relative newbie compared to NUS and NTU. How is it that their graduates command much higher starting salaries? Is SMU gaming the statistics or are they really doing something right to make their graduates look so attractive?

Also, now that SMU also has a law school and its first batch will be graduating this year, it would be interesting to see whether SMU law grads will topple NUS law grads from the top of the rankings...

[QUOTE=NUS Student;10577Also, now that SMU also has a law school and its first batch will be graduating this year, it would be interesting to see whether SMU law grads will topple NUS law grads from the top of the rankings...[/QUOTE]

More importantly, is there going to be oversupply?

[k3vin]

I guess, due to the nature of SMU's education, generalizing here but.. they generally would bound to be more outspoken than say NTU or NUS students, so are able to come tops in interviews, smaller class sizes where you can interact helped.

[curryrice]

Originally Posted by blackswan

In addition, the top 20 per cent of its graduates, usually those working in financial institutions, took home an average salary of $5,062. There were some among the 125 top-earners who were paid up to $13,000 a month.

Actually I'm more interested in 'average' pay rather than the top 20%. 'Cos this is what I will most LIKELY get if I'm hired and it's more realistic and practical this way.

These super high paying jobs are usually investment bankers, commodities traders, wealth managers, hedge funds analysts and the like. The next tier are the management consultants.

Make no mistakes, these are tough work, long hours and stressful environments. You will be handling billions of dollars, and profits/losses per day counted in millions. You need to be able to work round the clock, in line with trading hours in major exchanges around the world.

You need to understand how financial markets work, make quick decisions when new information surfaces, able to understand complicated financial models.

Not everyone is ABLE to do this kind of job. And amongst those able to, very few are WILLING to. No work-life balance at all. Most people going in are either aiming to earn the max in 5 years and retire, or really like such work. (The former sounds alot like prostitution, lol).

Why are these top earners cluster around SMU? Because these requires training in finance and SMU has the greatest concentration of finance majors. But you can find such top earners from NBS and NUS Bizad. And even other schools like Mathematics or Computer Science but these are rarer.

So don't be too envious of them. They earned it.

Btw I'm not one of them. I'm not willing to lead that kind of life and have no interests in finance. I just have a few friends inside.