What Qualifies as "Relevant" Coursework?

First of all, congratulations on your offer!

Here's another free resource to learn accounting: http://learnaccountingforfree.com

Go through all the videos and you'll have a better understanding of accounting than most of your peers who took the class at school. There are also some advanced accounting courses that you can take through the same company, but they cost $50-$99/class, if I'm not mistaken.

Damodaran is another good resource, and you can take his MBA-level classes on Valuation, CorpFin and Investment Philosophies online for free: http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/

If you take just an accounting course, you'll be fine. A corp fin class will supplement that knowledge, but frankly, it's not even necessary. You'll learn everything you need to do on the job anyway.

From my experience the most relevant courses out of undergrad have been in accounting as you will be analyzing f/s and building models. Know how the 3 f/s flow (outside of memorizing questions found in interview guides; i mean truly understand it) and pick up as much intermediate accounting as you can. An entry level corporate finance / finance 101 type class will also be helpful. Don't look like you've never seen excel before also.

thank you all for your reply!

practice on your own portfolio as if: understand what pays out in short term vs long term based on your assumptions; determine what will work for you over the long term, you may have less time later to invest for yourself.

Love 101: The Art of Seduction

It's great with female managers

I m still in college, but I suggest Monetary Theory/Economics, it's very useful for a finance major in order to understand better what affects interest rates, dunno if you can apply this knowledge directly to IBD.

Art 101

Latin, so you can fake like you went to prep school if you didn't

Economics classes, duh.

Also, Japan in the Modern World. That country basically told itself, in the 1860's, "Fuck it, we suck compared to the rest of the world. We may be small and feeble now, but we're going to set our eyes on greatness and damn be the next Western power who dares to pick on us." They did a complete rehaul of their military and state government, owned China and Russia (in 1895 and 1905, respectively), and was considered part of the "Western powers" for some time. That kind of drive and ambition is inspiring.

Math classes are good. Inevitably, the more math you do, the more intelligent and better of a critical thinker you become.

The internet. Don't let your schooling get in the way of your education.

last 100 years of history, especially the US, Japan, Germany etc.

Good info, I will seek it.

Awww how cute you guys are talking about me

Logic courses

My school's business school offers an Investment Banking Essentials class for undergrads. Basically puts you through an M&A, a bond offering, an LBO, among other deals. It's a great way to get hands on experience and I would check to see if your school has any similar classes.

fixed income

Relevant for IB? Neither. You're not going to use anything beyond high school math. Actually even the high school math might be an overkill since it covers stuff like trig/logs/basic derivatives etc. So more like middle school.

If you want to do something quant-ish in the future, you're probably going to need both, and way beyond that - at least the multivariable calc and diff. equations, but real analysis is desirable. You need the analysis for serious stuff within the probability/stats anyways.

For consulting, stats can be useful sometimes, econometrics even more so (regressions, cluster analysis, things like that).

Honestly, for IB (if you're dead set on it), dropping both calc and stats and picking up some accounting and maybe some lower-level computer science classes (like algorithms, VBA etc) is going to be much more useful and gives you some technical skills to include on your CV. If you really have to pick one, I'd pick advanced stats cause it sounds superficially more complex/impressive to a layman.

I'm not sure what you mean by intermediate calculus course, but you probably need at least Calc 2 (better to have Calc 3 since there's multivariate integration) to deal with probability models involving continuous functions. I doubt either is relevant for IB, though most kids have probably completed Calc 2. To be clear I'm considering: 1. Calc 1 (limits, derivatives, perhaps an introduction to basic integration) 2. Calc 2 (single variable integration, series and sequences) 3. Calc 3 (multivariable calculus)

I'm in the same boat as you big shot hopeful, hoping for the same thing hahah.

Econometrics, Math Stat, Linear Algebra, and Probability are good ones if you want to try and land a trading gig for sophomore year (might be easier than IB)

Take as much stats and probability as possible. Also not math--but any economics courses as well.

Took calc 2, 3, linear alg / diff eq, and an advanced stats course as a finance major. Have never used any of it outside of the classroom and have probably forgotten most, if not all, of it beyond the high-level concepts. If you're dead-set on taking one I'd say stats.

I should've taken more bullshit courses to inflate my GPA but oh well.

Probability and stats would probably be the best along with econometrics. Only place I've seen them are in CFA material, but it is helpful in those regards.

Also a math major. I take math classes because I like them, the probability of any of them being concretely useful in finance is pretty low.

Heck, most of the time even when their course material is being applied it's more about having an intuition about the math than being able to do it. Although a high level of the former tends to bring the latter with it in my experience.

Thanks for all the input guys! In truth, it's sort of less about the skill set learned in the class and more about what would look good in the relevant courses section of a not-so quantitative resume haha

Entrepreneurship and courses on valuation. Sometimes there are ones specifically for VC/PE.

Google Damodaran's valuation courses. They may be on iTunes University..

Take as many accounting and finance classes as you can. It will make the day to day a lot easier. You will want to focus your first year learning your sector as most people automatically assume you're up to speed on the finance part. Economics is nice to know but its not really pertinent to your job as your not going to do any econometric modeling or forecasting things like CPI. On the other hand the portfolio management class will help you with your CFA level 3 and understanding the thought process of asset managers. Also that IPO class would help a lot if you end up doing an IPO yourself on the job.

Does your school offer securities valuation?

@Kings, Thanks, I was feeling the same way. I forgot to mention I'm on the path for the honors program where two additional financial accounting courses are required on top of the basic financial and managerial ones. It would be interesting to look at the other acc electives and see if its worth tacking another one on.

@future, unfortunately no.

I'd take whatever has the best professor to be honest.

Math classes for investment banking ?

econometrics

If kids from Ivy's are getting in with liberal arts degrees you probably don't need to know that much math to do the job.

1. arithmetic
2. basic idea of continuous math (e.g. know what a derivative is, know what an integral is), basic discrete probability, basic understanding of regressions (know what a correlation is!). Everyone knows this of course. Some people have an advantage when they're well versed in VBA though- if you want to count that as a "quant/math" class. *Also it's always a good idea to know a little more math than required. You can't master Pre-Elem Algebra until you've taken Elem Algebra.
3. no idea. But I would imagine it depends on what area/industry you're consulting for! (oil industry? financial risk management? software company?)

For trading, whether quantitative or not, you need to know about pricing vanilla products, especially options. If they ask you what the Black Scholes formula is, you have to know what the normal distribution is, why you can use the risk-free world, what is the relation between the BS formula and the discounted payoff discounted... I got these kind of questions for a front office role in derivatives trading (not quant).

And as said above, you need to know what correlation is, what covariance is, what a distribution is, what a linear regression is, how to calculate basic derivatives, integrals, etc.

Point-Set Topology is a must for IB.

Not much more than arithmetic for consulting. For non quant trading, you might need to know some basic probability.