Is a career in investment banking possible as a Computer Science major at UVA? I know UVA has McIntire, but I'd much rather do Math & CS rather than McIntire at UVA, join finance clubs, work in finance (consulting, banking, etc.), and launch my own startup thereafter. If anyone can give me some insight that'd be great.
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Interesting because I'm in an extremely similar position. I'm double majoring in Physics and Computer Science at a school that is (I think) significantly less of a target than UVA. I just landed a MM SA position in NY (although admittedly lower tier, think Stifel/HSBC/RJ). Obviously I'm a little biased here, but I think it's more than possible. Almost every interviewer seemed to really enjoy that I came from a different background than 95% of applicants and it led to a lot of easy, free-flowing, and genuinely interesting conversations.
The hard part is convincing them that you're not just a smart STEM focused kid that just randomly threw in some applications to some banks. For this I did almost exactly what you said, multiple finance clubs AND finance related internships, to signal your career interests in a meaningfully way. I look at it like this: short term it would probably be easier to break into IB with a finance/accounting (McIntire in your case) degree, but long term I don't know that I want to be in finance either and so I'd like to have those hard skills (coding, upper level math, etc.) to give me leeway in terms of what I can do the rest of my career.
Long story short, yes you absolutely can. BUT you need to make sure that you have enough finance related things (again clubs/internships) to speak to when the inevitable 'Why IB/finance?' question comes around. Hope this helps.
Just wondering why you would enter IB when you are majoring in Comp Sci and do software engineering? Almost similar comps (170K all in for SWE FAANG vs. +240K all in for EB/BB top bucket) but SWE has better lifestyle and perks.
As an analyst I would rather go back and do coding but for my life I cannot do debugging without smashing my keyboard into two pieces.
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