What classes do you regret taking in college?

For those of you who have worked in finance for a few years, what classes/subjects do you encourage or discourage current students to take? Is it worthwhile to take a bunch of finance classes, or should you try to take a broader range of subjects since you will end up learning all that finance material through work anyways?

I would especially like to hear from Wharton alum what your thoughts are on upper level account and finance classes.

 

all the classes that didnt transfer between schools.

Other wise all the math is useless, I suppose it was great mental endurance test but it is useless for me in real life. I actually seek out other math kids at work and discuss applications and come up wioth nothing other than than a few quants and algos.

 

Getting a first round interview has more to do with the basic network/good schoo/luck honestly. After that its really fit/te h stuff. No one sifts through stacks of res' looking only for math majors to hire or throw away.

In interviews you will likely know more than the interviewer provided he himself isnt a quant, theorist, algotrader etc...financial engineer of sorts. But even then it has become focused and specialized at point for them.

This is all relative to what you are actually doing/interviewing for.

 
dipset1011:
didn't know colleges gave out A+. Must be a community college thing.
hahaha. zing.

yeah... I hate the fact that I took premed focused classes my freshman year. unlike the other poster, I can safely say that I did not receive anything close to A+ in any of them. lmao

 
noonies:
Wouldn't really call the Wharton School of Business a community college
yeah, but with grade inflation at the Ivies, an A+ at Wharton is the equivalent of an A at MIT or Berkeley.

I'm sure someone will now come along and try to argue that an A+ is really hard to get at Wharton; only 10% of the class gets one. Those people will be providing a lot of comic relief for the engineering majors in the audience- sort of like the guy who claims that his family is middle class because his parents only bought him a Mustang GT for his birthday while his friends got Ferraris.

 
Bodhis:
dipset1011:
didn't know colleges gave out A+. Must be a community college thing.

hahahaha, yeahhh. A+ wtf is that?

Also, I don't know many people who take orgo (especially II) and get A's at a legit school. Seems like most people are happy passing or receiving a C or B on the scale and picking up the gpa slack w/other courses.

chem major

 

I regret taking anything remotely related to finance, economics, management, all that bullshit.

I regret not taking more mathematics and engineering courses in general, thermodynamics and metallurgy in particular.

 

weather climate geography bc had no interest in the subject and it resulted in the only C+ on my transcript. But I guess that's the price one pays for liberal arts education. In retrospect, I should have taken more math courses or minored in math or something to go along with my econ major.

 

To the OP, I don't think you can regret taking some of the upper-level finance/accounting courses.....especially FNCE 207 and 206....corp val and derivatives respectively. Those were the starting point of conversations in a couple interviews (since you'll often get Wharton alums as the junior people in 1st-round interviews).

That said, for your electives, try to take some easier courses to help offset the GPA hit you might get.

 
Best Response

Human Resources, Organizational Behavoir 1 and 2. Marketing 2 was a total bitch. Operations Management got retarded and way too much towards the end.

Courses I enjoyed: -Econ Electives and Upper year finance courses. -Working Capital Management --> All about cash and how CFOs BS to make it seem like its there when its not. -Developmental Economics --> How to save Africa one day... -Economics of Strategy --> Using porter and microeconomic tools to look at M&A style decisions in a framework. -Personal Finance --> When you marry that gold-digger how to protect them assets. -International Finance --> What those Hedge Funds did to kick Greece around 4 months ago.

Also any entrepreneurial finance or M&A course, I would take for sure. Since that is what you will be doing for a career.

My school we had Advanced Corporate Finance - Doing cases using the Daren dean's textbook. Most of the class was either going into high finance or consulting. Very easy class as most people by then had done internships and built models, fun discussing some cases too.

 
bugattiveyron:
Wharton has always been known for its grade deflation, just like princeton and unlike any of the other ivies.

Recruiters/alumns know this, so there's no point in debating

Well, I've been a recruiter for one of the BBs, and I know a number of other recruiters from the BBs including a few UPenn alumns, and we were not aware of this.

Yes, it's difficult to get an A or an A+ at Wharton. There's a lot of smart kids at the school and I'm sure that if we transposed Wharton's curve to most good state schools- and moved its students there- most students would get a higher GPA.

But students at Wharton already get the benefit of the school's selectivity in recruiting decisions. What recruiters really need is a standardized system where we can say that a 3.5 GPA means X in relation to a student's class so we can do a separate calculation based off of the school's selectivity. At all the top ten engineering programs, we can be relatively sure that a 3.0 GPA in the core curriculum means an engineer was in at least the top 50% of his class, and a 3.5 core GPA usually means that the kid is pretty darned smart relative to his class- likely one and a half to two standard deviations above average across the spectrum of engineering courses. Very few students- in any of the engineering programs- will graduate with more than a 3.7 or 3.8 GPA, and for that to be a CORE GPA is just unheard of.

H/Y/Prin/Penn all ruin that regime (with the exception of Princeton's engineering department.) A 3.5 at UPenn is roughly average. There's no easy way to compare, and I think that's ultimately to the schools' detriment if the school already has a reputation for giving everyone a B+ or an A because they're smart. Maybe UPenn needs to move to a Fail/Pass & percentile ranking system so we know where a student really ranks.

 
IlliniProgrammer:
bugattiveyron:
Wharton has always been known for its grade deflation, just like princeton and unlike any of the other ivies.

Recruiters/alumns know this, so there's no point in debating

Well, I've been a recruiter for one of the BBs, and I know a number of other recruiters from the BBs including a few UPenn alumns, and we were not aware of this.

Yes, it's difficult to get an A or an A+ at Wharton. There's a lot of smart kids at the school and I'm sure that if we transposed Wharton's curve to most good state schools- and moved its students there- most students would get a higher GPA.

But students at Wharton already get the benefit of the school's selectivity in recruiting decisions. What recruiters really need is a standardized system where we can say that a 3.5 GPA means X in relation to a student's class so we can do a separate calculation based off of the school's selectivity. At all the top ten engineering programs, we can be relatively sure that a 3.0 GPA in the core curriculum means an engineer was in at least the top 50% of his class, and a 3.5 core GPA usually means that the kid is pretty darned smart relative to his class- likely one and a half to two standard deviations above average across the spectrum of engineering courses. Very few students- in any of the engineering programs- will graduate with more than a 3.7 or 3.8 GPA, and for that to be a CORE GPA is just unheard of.

H/Y/Prin/Penn all ruin that regime (with the exception of Princeton's engineering department.) A 3.5 at UPenn is roughly average. There's no easy way to compare.

I may be completely wrong, but a 3.5 is definitely not average (at least DEFINITELY not at the median). From the curves I have seen, approx. the middle 40% of the wharton classes get between a 2.7-3.3 (B- to B+).

 

This is why in my post I clearly said that the grade inflation pertains to the college of arts & sciences. Having done finance in Wharton and a liberal arts minor in the college, I saw a significant difference in terms of grading and the general evaluation process between the two schools.

But regardless....none of this matters. This is why firms typically have GPA cut-offs, and will even consider students below it if they come from difficult engineering programs or under other circumstances. At the end of the day, it's about your interviews/connections/internships, not the bs classes you may or not have taken to boost your GPA.

 

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