Do any of you feel like you've had an intellectual decline after starting college because of majoring in business?
I feel like I was so much more intelligent and academically driven in high school. I studied hard subjects like AP Physics C, Calc 3, AP Chem in high school and did a bunch of olympiads and now I'm majoring in finance and I've seen that I've become a lot less sharp. I always feel underwhelmed and can't study or think as much anymore. I've also just finished a year of college. I'm almost certain that I've lost a few IQ points. On the other my friends who're going to like 80% acceptance rate state schools and majoring in engineering/CS/pre-med seem a lot smarter than they were. Education really does affect your IQ.
Holy smokes guys. This kid studied AP Physics! Fuck dude what's it like to be a rockstar
Haha you’re going for fire. The point of the post was not to say that I took AP Physics. I’m sure a very high percentage of business students currently at targets/semi-targets took that class. I also did Math competitions and bio/Chem Olympiad. My point was that after taking AP physics and similar classes in high school, a business major in college feels like a massive decline in intellectual rigor.
graduated from a liberal arts college so take this as you will, but from what i can tell, it's really up to how well you can (1) explain the intuition behind concepts and (2) connect seemingly unrelated ideas together.
(1) for a lot of econ and finance concepts, i think the best thing you can do is challenge yourself to explain things intuitively rather than defining things. for example, a bond's duration is the price sensitivity to a change in interest rates. the real (and original) definition is the time weighted average of present value cash flows to return the principal. what is the intuition behind that definition? if you were to ask me, i would say that future coupon payments returns your principal, which reduces the money (value) you are owed in the future. the final output of time shows the real maturity time IF future cash flows (coupon payment) was a continuous variable than a discrete one (think of a exponential function graph of future cash flows adjusted by time weight). therefore, shorter duration bonds are generally safer than longer duration, and thus, value at risk (VaR) is lower. so what is VaR? so on and so forth
(2) if this gets too boring for you, mix in other disciplines to your thought. this is easier if you've taken courses outside your business school ones. psych course? explain business drivers using psych (behavioural finance). sociology? explain business place issues using soc theories. environmental science? this one is a good one because envr sci makes explicit use of a time variable, so there exists present value vs future value of natural capital, optimal levels of emissions for abatement, hedonic pricing method, etc. you can even explain interest rates differently in envr sci because a high interest rate (ie high "intergenerational discount rate") means that you value your present marginal utility / assets (nature, for ex, included because that brings you future value) more than you value your kids' or grandkids' future marginal utility / assets -- something humans are super prone to doing because we don't tend to think far enough...you guessed it, psychology at play. we can even go envr sci, econ / finance and psychology all together: how you perceive risk. humans tend to overestimate the risk of things less likely to happen and underestimate the risk of things more likely to happen (think about how many times you've engaged in a stupid act that will get you hurt but thought "eh, should be fine" but wasn't). connect that to envr sci, where the risk of climate change is floods, drought, deadly heat waves, ridiculous cold weather, etc. it's pretty damn likely these will happen with our levels of consumption, but we think "eh, just one extra person driving is fine" for an easier commute than public transit so you underestimate, when in reality everyone is likely thinking this way so everyone drives. your present marginal utility of driving was significantly more highly valued than future generations. but you might also say, "wait, some people need to drive because some areas just don't have any access to public transit" and i would say you're absolutely correct. then you can get into why communities were structured the way they've become -- which is a sociological, a political and a historical inquiry.
that was a long winded way of saying that your education is really what you make out of it. if you just want to ace the classes that you take at the surface level of inquiry because you have other things to do than go on an intellectual inquiry, that's completely fine -- my sophomore spring and junior fall was like that because of recruiting, for example. stem and engineering naturally forces you to do these things because those courses have proofs and direct applications (ie, difficult and measurable technical skills) embedded into them. with social sciences and professional studies, you need to seek them out (ie., you need to be a "thinker" first and foremost, which is why skills are considered not technical, except the small amount of math you need to do)
Studying business should not be a thing. Math, physics, computer science, and even history or creative writing are far superior in an intellectual sense because they actually teach you to think critically, which is by far the most invaluable skill someone can have.
A ten year old can memorize the rules of accounting and basic corporate finance parlance. The whole point of academia is to cultivate your ability to think.
Most of my friends studied business and essentially learned nothing throughout the entirety of college. I studied math and loved every second of it, and it changed the way I think more than anything else. I also took a slew of military history courses out of personal interest and connected with a few key professors on a level that had an exponential impact on me intellectually. That is what college is all about in my opinion.
I realize I’m biased, but nine times out of ten I’d rather hire/work with the passionate history major with exceptional critical thinking/problem solving skills who can break down an outside-the-box take on the strategic genius of Napoleon at Austerlitz than the run of the mill finance hardo who memorized a bunch of guides.
I agree with your assertion about soft skills. Critical thinking/common sense is often useless without a keen ability to articulate yourself and relate to others. I have also heard the point that the value of a business degree lies outside the classroom (I see the merit in having the network, though personally I think this makes no sense as the sole basis for an education).
As someone who has taken both advanced calculus as well as virtually every upper division finance course, I can tell you categorically that finance courses require very little actual critical thinking and, contrary to what you suggest, no material level of math in any sense of the word. The vast majority of business classes simply teach students to memorize definitions and formulas, leaving them with a very poor grasp of the underlying theory behind why those formulas actually exist.
Here is an example that epitomizes my point and, ironically, includes calculus - take a public company's beta. I can tell you from experience that 99% of banking professionals simply read this number off Bloomberg and call it a day. They can recite the bumper-sticker definition, but they actually have no idea where the number comes from or how it is even calculated. And yet its use in cost of equity is ubiquitous and has a tremendous impact on valuation models for mammoth billion-dollar deals. Plotting the respective price histories of both the company in question and the broader market (e.g. SPX), beta is the coefficient (slope) resulting from fitting an optimal linear predictor (the line of best fit) that minimizes the sum of squared vertical deviations from the line. Thus, we want to minimize Σ[Yi - (B0 + B1Xi)]^2, which can be achieved by taking its partial derivatives, setting them to zero, and solving for B1. A little linear algebra later and we come to see that that beta simply equals correlation * vol ratio. Why is this important? It is extremely important because we could easily have a situation where the beta in question is either 1) completely wrong in a practical sense and/or 2) very misrepresentative of a firm's true risk to equity holders. Case in point - company A has undergone a major restructuring/bankruptcy and has a trailing 5-year a correlation of of 0.1 with the S&P but is 10x as volatile, while company B has a correlation of 0.8 and is 1.25x as volatile. Both of these businesses have "betas" of 1, or, in finance parlance, pose an equal risk to equity holders. Do you see my point? The vast majority of those studying business would not have the wherewithal to reason through something like this, and resultantly would lose extremely valuable underlying information/insight that could potentially change the entire landscape of a deal.
This of course is just one granular example, though I think it is very representative of the broader point