Am I screwed because I didn`t choose Wharton (Penn CAS)

I still no very little about what I want to do whether it<span><a href="/finance-dictionary/trading-overview">s stock trading</a></span> (thats what I do now for fun) or w.e but I`m pretty sure I want a career in Finance. The thing is my past pleb self chose to major in econ at the CAS at uPenn. Did i mess up?

 
Best Response

Like the others commented- VBA makes life easier. And, maybe more importantly: you are at Penn, you will survive just fine.

You mentioned you were trading stocks for fun. If you can demonstrate some measurable coding skills to go along with that in either VBA,R, Python(basically anything that handles statistics very well) I think you would have a very good shot at prop trading shops.

 

I am at a target school (generally a few slots below UPenn for recruiting) and a lot of my friends with rubbish majors (econ, poly-sci, english) are doing just fine in IBD/S&T/AM recruiting at BBs and EBs. Granted, they could recite the Vault guide / WSO guides in their sleep and are aggressive - but that's nearly a pre-requisite in recruiting for these positions anyway.

 

I have a friend at Penn who majored in computer science and then recruited for investment banking-- which has nothing at all to do with comp sci, despite what some might say. As far as I can tell, the major didn't really harm him. You are at Penn, after all. He was still able to secure plenty of interviews, and he'll be interning this summer at a pretty good middle-market (think RBC, Wells Fargo, Macquarie, Stifel, that sort of thing).

I don't know the exact case with trading, but I don't imagine it'll be a problem either. However, you will be expected to know your technicals just as well as the finance majors, so be wary of that.

 

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