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You just finished freshman year, all your classes are going to be easy as hell. If you really want to take the most challenging courses then go to people, your advisor, or your department chairs and ask what courses are the most challenging.
If you're still able to cruise through all of them but still want to have a finance career then get a 4.0 GPA, minor in something you like that's completely unrelated finance, join some clubs. You'll be a stronger applicant because of it.
I hate to break it to you, but you'll never learn "economic intuition" from academic classes, especially if your goal is macro trading. I was an econ major at what is widely considered the best, or one of the best, econ programs in the country (think Princeton, MIT, UChicago, Oxbridge, LSE, etc.) and my classes were completely useless. I would go so far as to say that most of the core econ sequence was actively harmful in the sense that they teach mental models which put blinders on your thinking.
I wound up getting a B- in my "Money and Banking" course and now know more about money and banking than anyone I went to school with or any of my former professors (including former central bankers) as the product I trade now is intimately related. This isn't justifying getting a poor GPA, as having a good GPA (3.7+), particularly from a semi-target, is an important signal, but just goes to show that what you learn in finance/economics in school usually isn't relevant.
Stay in the finance major, take lots of history and philosophy (particularly more analytic philosophy, not that Hegel/Heidegger garbage) electives if offered, and add a CS/Math/Stats major or minor since you're at a semi-target. Don't need to be super quanty, but it's pretty important to at least know your way around some basic statistical analysis in Python (think pandas, matplotlib/seabourne, scikit-learn, etc.) these days. Econometrics (and its pre-reqs like linear algebra, probability theory, and statistics) will be the one important class that you take in your major, so don't slack on this one. If they have some more advanced classes on derivatives (swaps, futures, etc.) those would be good to take too.
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It doesn't help you with economic intuition, but it does with logic and understanding arguments. There's a lot of bullshit in macro and it helps to be able to precisely pick apart someone's argument. It also helps in teaching you "how to think" correctly by forcing you to actually think deeply about something before making glib or superficial conclusions.
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What kind of math did you saw in Highscool?
International students usually have a better level in mathematics. For example, if you come from France, and went to a good high school and did math there, you finish high school having covered the equivalent of Calc 2 and other classes such as linear algebra…
consider a switch to math major
Don't...
Source: myself, a math major
I was pure and enjoyed it - helps you separate yourself. Commenter above clearly wasn't cut out for it
Do econ and a math minor. Finance as an undergrad degrees seems hella boring. At least the higher level econ courses are pretty interesting
If you want something more intellectually demanding then do Quantitative finance such as mathematical finance, financial engineering or computational finance.
Congrats on UVA
I changed my course from econs to maths. Wouldn't have landed a seat at a macro shop out of undergrad if it wasn't for the switch.
Emailed the department head and turns out that I can only transfer within the finance department
Ah that sucks. The only possible way around this in my view is to have exceptional personal quant projects that you can talk about in interviews.
I'd recommend working on your soft skills if you see getting easy A's as an issue. Hit a bar dawg
Semi-Target is paradise
College is more of a screening mechanism, you’ll use little of what you learn and have to unlearn some of it. Make your own side curriculum and also have fun.
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