The numbers side of business - blah
Hello all, new member here.
Anyway, Im starting freshman year at college in the business program. I go to what i consider a pretty good school. Ive read its pretty wise to keep anonymous on the forum, so Ill just say its a top 50 business school, and a top 50 school in the states according to all rankings.
Anyway, Ive always been very attracted to the creative side of business - advertising, marketing, campaigns, and Ive always wanted to become a creative director or a marketing manager for a company.
However, my business curriculum is very rigorous in the numbers part of business....accounting, financing, economics. And ultimately, by the end of the year Im going to have a pick a concentration area for business. Aka, do I want be in marketing, or do I want to be in accounting.
My question is, has anyone tried to take both career paths (creative and quantitative) in business after/during college, and which one did you find offered more/better job opportunities. I would love to hear any opinions or experiences.
My conflict is that I am very good at the creative side of business. I have impeccable communication and presentation skills, and I am very interesting in marketing and advertising. However, I feel the job field is much more ambiguous and harder to break into than if I were to focus on accounting, financing, economics...
Marketing gets you a job at
Marketing gets you a job at burger king.
And I'm not just some asshole giving you a smart ass quip. That's the truth. Marketing majors generally go nowhere.
Also, it's much much easier to major in finance or accounting and break into marketing than vice versa. Like many people, my sister is in sales and wishes she'd stuck it out and majored in finance even though she had no love for the subject. I've seen lots of sales guys with finance/accounting majors, it helped them break into the sales side of finance more than a marketing degree would have. You can always learn marketing later, it's all common sense really. That's all I've got. Choose wisely, you only do college once.
Also, while the marketing
Also, while the marketing courses in your program may or may not reflect it, marketing requires much more analytics/quantitative comfort than you'd likely expect.
Proboscis
Ron Paul: Marketing gets you
Marketing gets you a job at burger king.
And I'm not just some asshole giving you a smart ass quip. That's the truth. Marketing majors generally go nowhere.
Also, it's much much easier to major in finance or accounting and break into marketing than vice versa. Like many people, my sister is in sales and wishes she'd stuck it out and majored in finance even though she had no love for the subject. I've seen lots of sales guys with finance/accounting majors, it helped them break into the sales side of finance more than a marketing degree would have. You can always learn marketing later, it's all common sense really. That's all I've got. Choose wisely, you only do college once.
I would honestly have to disagree to a certain extent. I think just as many finance/accounting majors end up at "burger king" jobs. Obviously there is going to be a bias on this forum, which specializes in finance, but you even have to admit that a lot of college is how much effort you put it into. With the right grades, the right networking, and the proper skill set, im sure one can go further with a focus on marketing than just "burger king". Just as in finance, Im sure those that clowned around in college are in "burger king" jobs as well.
Thank you though for the response, I do appreciate it. While I disagree on the extremity of your opinion, I do see its validity.
Proboscis: Also, while the
Also, while the marketing courses in your program may or may not reflect it, marketing requires much more analytics/quantitative comfort than you'd likely expect.
Completely understand. Fortunately, our business program gives you a good dose of everything, and even with picking a concentration, you still practice a good amount of accounting, financing, and economics. Because of that, I'll be walking out with a general business degree, just with more knowledge on certain parts. Ultimately, I'll have to use that knowledge to chisel down to a more specific subject in business.
I would do neither and would
I would do neither and would do something STEM if I had to do it all over again. Those are the things that you're not going to easily learn on the job.
You know 80% of everything you need to know about marketing right now...most of it is common sense. The rest of it is data mining for targeting. I agree with the other guys above.. You may not end up flipping burgers at Burger King, but you may be figuring out what coupons you should be delivering on the take-away bag or the paper tray cover for the Burger Kings in Tampa. On second thought, flipping burgers doesn't sound so bad.
Turbo leverage for capital explosion -- BD Capital
My WSO Blog
Marketing major = not very
Marketing major = not very exit opps.
Major in finance, economics, or related and make the move if you want.
The HBS guys have MAD SWAGGER. They frequently wear their class jackets to boston bars, strutting and acting like they own the joint. They just ooze success, confidence, swagger, basically attributes of alpha males.
I agree with the others.
I agree with the others. Finance, accounting or dare I say law school... BTW all of those bullshit classes you think your taking are laying down the foundation for what you will carry with you for the rest of your life. If I could do it all over again I would have went to law school and then MBA. After that with a little experience under your belt and a hustler's ambition the world is yours.
-Gorilla A.
-------------------
“I've forgotten who I had lunch with earlier, and even more important, where.”
― Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho
Bullshit about marketing not
Bullshit about marketing not having exit opps/being a terrible career choice. Most people here have no idea what a good marketing job is. Product Management pays very well out of school and the experience is highly valued among many companies. In fact, if you go look up top level execs or even look at VC/MBB people, you'll quickly find that MANY people have product management experience. Additionally, many companies won't even consider undergrads for product management roles and only hire out of MBA programs. I have multiple friends doing product management at top F500 companies and started at packages over 80k+ right out of undergrad. Keep in mind most of the people here are so finance-driven they don't realize you can be very successful in other careers.
brutalglide: Bullshit about
Bullshit about marketing not having exit opps/being a terrible career choice. Most people here have no idea what a good marketing job is. Product Management pays very well out of school and the experience is highly valued among many companies. In fact, if you go look up top level execs or even look at VC/MBB people, you'll quickly find that MANY people have product management experience. Additionally, many companies won't even consider undergrads for product management roles and only hire out of MBA programs. I have multiple friends doing product management at top F500 companies and started at packages over 80k+ right out of undergrad. Keep in mind most of the people here are so finance-driven they don't realize you can be very successful in other careers.
It is true that you can have a successful career in marketing. It is also true that you don't need to major in marketing in college to have one.
Google is basically a marketing firm, with a search engine to provide millions of targeted audiences for their advertisers. The people with STEM degrees who can help optimize revenue by segmenting the audience are probably in higher demand than a traditional marketing major. The quants have started taking over marketing as well. It's not like Mad Men, anymore than Wall Street is models & bottles.
Turbo leverage for capital explosion -- BD Capital
My WSO Blog
TheGuzzle: Hello all, new
Hello all, new member here.
Anyway, Im starting freshman year at college in the business program. I go to what i consider a pretty good school. Ive read its pretty wise to keep anonymous on the forum, so Ill just say its a top 50 business school, and a top 50 school in the states according to all rankings.
Anyway, Ive always been very attracted to the creative side of business - advertising, marketing, campaigns, and Ive always wanted to become a creative director or a marketing manager for a company.
However, my business curriculum is very rigorous in the numbers part of business....accounting, financing, economics. And ultimately, by the end of the year Im going to have a pick a concentration area for business. Aka, do I want be in marketing, or do I want to be in accounting.
My question is, has anyone tried to take both career paths (creative and quantitative) in business after/during college, and which one did you find offered more/better job opportunities. I would love to hear any opinions or experiences.
My conflict is that I am very good at the creative side of business. I have impeccable communication and presentation skills, and I am very interesting in marketing and advertising. However, I feel the job field is much more ambiguous and harder to break into than if I were to focus on accounting, financing, economics...
Hah, when I was an undergraduate I thought marketing was about qualitative and creative stuff too. But it isn't. Advertising is only a small fragment of marketing. And the most quantitative shit I have seen in the business world was the statistical methods used in optimizing marketing spend and advertising budget.
You, my friend, sound like you want to be in PR. Or a more senior ad-industry creative. If you put in enough years slogging away at non-creative stuff in those roles, you'll be allowed to do something creative by the time you're thirty. If you can't handle the numbers side of business, you're not going to make it anywhere else. On the marketing side, all roads lead to product manager... and you will want to be extremely comfortable with statistical methods in order to do well there.
That said, accounting is the least quantitative of the business disciplines. All you need there is elementary school math. Corporate finance is high school math, aka time value of money, pre-calc, etc. Marketing, trading, and asset management are college and grad school math, aka statistics and so forth. So if I were you, assuming you can add, subtract, multiply, and divide, I'd go for accounting and take it to a corporate finance route.
As for your creative urge, either switch to art school or do what the rest of us do and work on a novel or whatever in the free time you have left over from making all that bank and spending it.
See my other WSO blog posts
The marketing major is the
The marketing major is the trendiest offered currently on American campuses. It's also the biggest joke.
Here to learn and hopefully pass on some knowledge as well. SB if I helped.
In general hard skill courses
In general hard skill courses (engineering, finance) help much more than soft (communications, marketing)
For e.g. someone with an engineering degree or finance / quant but has great communication / presentation skills has a big advantage. Besides, with good training, it's not incredibly hard to gain some of those presentation skills and more structured approach to marketing. But you can't graduate with marketing and hope to become someone proficient in finance with some "training", just sayin'.
kenfucius says
You are going to need some
You are going to need some programming or graphic design skills to get into the ad world, especially if you wanna be a UX designer or something similar. Stuff like PHP, javascript and HTML will help you immensely break into this business. Don't waste your time doing something that you don't want to do just because it's 'safer,' you will regret that decision and ultimately go back to do what you are passionate about but this time you'll be 5 years older, already in debt and likely have way more responsibilities.
This to all my hatin' folks seeing me getting guac right now..
SirTradesaLot: brutalglide:
Bullshit about marketing not having exit opps/being a terrible career choice. Most people here have no idea what a good marketing job is. Product Management pays very well out of school and the experience is highly valued among many companies. In fact, if you go look up top level execs or even look at VC/MBB people, you'll quickly find that MANY people have product management experience. Additionally, many companies won't even consider undergrads for product management roles and only hire out of MBA programs. I have multiple friends doing product management at top F500 companies and started at packages over 80k+ right out of undergrad. Keep in mind most of the people here are so finance-driven they don't realize you can be very successful in other careers.
It is true that you can have a successful career in marketing. It is also true that you don't need to major in marketing in college to have one.
Google is basically a marketing firm, with a search engine to provide millions of targeted audiences for their advertisers. The people with STEM degrees who can help optimize revenue by segmenting the audience are probably in higher demand than a traditional marketing major. The quants have started taking over marketing as well. It's not like Mad Men, anymore than Wall Street is models & bottles.
For you to call Google a marketing firm shows that you have no understanding between the difference in product marketing, product management, and advertising. Google is an ADVERTISING company that employs many many many times more ad sales guys than marketers. STEM degrees do not teach you the soft skills you need for product management. I don't disagree with the fact that STEM degrees are very helpful for learning the hard skills that are required, but they do little for teaching you the soft skills that you will need.
i'm not a marketing major,
i'm not a marketing major, but have had no problems getting intervews/offers for marketing jobs/internships
but I did have 1 previous marketing internship
<3 andy & patrick
There is a lot of good advice
I work in marketing. I sit
MonkeyMath: I work in
"Who am I? I'm the guy that does his job. You must be the other guy."
Agreed with what?
Bankerella knows what she's
"Accept no one's definition of your life; define yourself."
Currently: quantitative marketing/business development
Previously: management consulting, investment banking
bankerella: TheGuzzle: Hell
Proboscis: Also, while the
Depends on what products you
pechamp: Depends on what