For someone looking to land a job in Investment Banking, Private Equity, Hedge Fund, etc. does it pay off in the long run to choose a difficult major?
For argument sake let's say that typical majors include: economics, finance, accounting, or something else business-related. And tougher majors include: math, computer science, and any type of engineering.
The workload and difficulty of classes between the groups is pretty significant, so I ask you is it worth it in the long run to choose a more difficult major?
No. Get the highest GPA you possible can. I double majored, and while I'm glad I did because I felt like I actually learned stuff, if I could go back and do it again I would've for sure just taken the easiest classes I could and just get a single degree. Others may disagree with me, but while I was taking 400 level English courses and struggling to get an A-, my peers were taking Introduction to Wacky Weather or some shit and getting an A+ with little to no work.
Agreed. Think of double majors as high risk & high reward. High risk because you need to work extra hard to get to the same GPA as an art major. The rewards show up after you start working (hopefully in the field you majored) as you zoom past your art major colleagues and make VP as they manage to buy their first non-hand-me-down-suit
lol at you proles. Education is for a life time. Learn what you can while you can. Develop a passion for something and pursue it.
Education is for a life time, and you have a life time to educate yourself. GPA, internship experience, and networking is all that college is good for anymore. If you truly have a passion for something, you can teach yourself way more via the internet than you can taking some stupid college course.
I'm about to graduate from a top PhD program. I guess I have a different perspective. After college, most people will never have the time or the drive to again self-study a subject rigorously. Physics majors that I know who went into finance don't read QFT or QED for fun. They're just too exhausted after getting home and are looking to unwind. They liked physics, but they don't like it enough to read string theory instead of heading out to the club. You're right that theoretically, anyone can learn a subject from the ground up with just the web, the library and a healthy dose of determination. There are many examples of this throughout history. However, these are exactly the people who would have treated college as an unparalleled scholastic experience anyway.
For the 99% of people on WSO who have no interest in pursuing a PhD, just know that if you ever planned to say get a deep understanding of geophysics or ancient Egyptian art, college is the best time to do it. If you think that this will get in the way of you getting that internship, fine, but just know that life never lets up. Before you know it, you're worrying about whether you will get that VP promotion and then it's worrying about where to send your kids for private school. If you think you're too busy to LEARN while in COLLEGE, just know then you'll never have time to learn. I guess it's fine since this is WSO after all, but it would truly be a shame if Wall Street ended up overrun with uncultured brutes.
I never got how someone can be so broad: 'IB, PE, HF, whatever'
Those are totally different jobs. How can you not care?
How are they "totally different?" Biochemical engineering and working in construction are totally different jobs.
IB and PE are almost exactly the same jobs.
HF is slightly different but what does it boil down to? Modelling in excel, getting and understanding of an industry, getting an understanding of a company, communicating your findings to others....I don't understand why you would not "get" that a college student with no experience of working in the real world let alone any of those three jobs would have an open view on which to pursue?
Well I guess every job is waking up and working. Yeah, no difference in those jobs at all. Hell 50% of the pageviews and content is moot on WSO if there's no difference
It is different in PE and IBD, but there's a lot of careers in the hedge fund world, not to mention the Research and S&T arms of most banks, for people who have strong technical competencies.
I think there could be some merit in majoring in computer sciences if you would consider working in that field in the event of the finance thing not working out. In essence, you could use the double major to set up a Plan B without having to do an Msc/MBA.
However, you will have to absolutely kill yourself to get workable grades if you do this, so if you just want to learn about math, comp-sci, engineering, etc. then you should probably just crack open some textbooks in your spare time and audit some classes if you can but spare yourself the burden of having to do all the projects and take all the tests. Plus, most majors have at least a few bullshit classes which nobody likes, and you get to skip those this way.
Put it this way - don't do a major you don't like just because you think it's easy. As a student you have more than enough time to triple major in math, physics, and chemical engineering with a 4.0. That's not the difficult part, being motivated to do all the work is. Study what you are most motivated to study.
In my situation and based on my goals, I don't think I'm really limited by getting a psychology major, with some quantitative work included, coming from a HYPSM with a 4.0. So far, I've gotten similar offers as all of my friends who are economics majors. I'm smart, but I'm definitely not intelligent enough to study engineering or hard math. And my economics program is largely theoretical compared to other schools, hardly applicable to real life. So I settled with something I knew I could excel in, and have more free time to devote to my other pursuits.
I can definitely see the benefit in studying, for example, a hard science when it comes to cognitive development. Skills in programming, math, etc. are an asset to have. but I don't really think it helps that much job-wise unless you're vying for a quant position.
What the hell is the M school.
MIT?
I would say CS and engineering, yes, those will allow you to more easily transition into a different career if finance doesn't pan on. As a math major, I would say it is not worth it from a risk/reward perspective, there is no clearly defined career switch you can make if you decide otherwise.
Do you want to have the possibility of having something to fall back on if you strike out in banking?
Doesn't matter what you study, does matter what your grades are. Pick something you like or something thats easy or something thats interesting to you. Just do well is all
no engineering is hard
If you are gonna invest so much time/money, why not choose something you are interested in learning and will enjoy for four years? I started out Engineering and was decent at it but switched to Economics. I did not enjoy the apparent lack of social/communication skills in my peers and realized Engineering wasn't exactly made for me. I looked around for majors as I wanted a decently rigorous/quantitative degree and eventually chose Economics and minored in Political Science and Finance.
Unless you are confident you can handle them, no. Your GPA will be a permanent part of your record. You can always study more on the side and even take a few classes but majoring is an entirely different thing especially if you're not truly prepared for it.
Better to be pragmatic and play the system so that you're at an advantage rather than taking risks that don't guarantee any additional reward.
I don't think it's worth it unless you absolutely love it. But, even if you love it, you will still have semesters where you spend 80 hours a week in the engineering lab banging your head against a wall trying to figure out some problem (and in my experience, I still got B's and C's for that effort level). And if for whatever reason you change your mind about banking, getting a job in engineering making $65k for 40 hours a week is a cake walk (no networking, no outside work, just make a resume).
First off, it's a hell of a lot easier to get in at Goldman Sachs than it is one of those places. Second, you won't have the upward salary/bonus mobility + opportunities to make a drastic career switch.
And now that I come to think about it, per hour, that's more than a first year analyst makes if they make $150k for 100 hours a week. But of course it doesn't scale the same over time and there are many more perks available to bankers.
I would say yes, but the tougher majors that are worth it are probably only comp sci and engineering (being biased cause I am an engineering student). While it is hard, I do study my ass of to keep my GPA high but I believe it will be worth it in the end as I can explore many career paths such as MGT Consulting, Finance, Engineering ect. Computer science is also good because you do most of what I said above as well. Difficult programs such as math I don't see the benefit as if you fail in finance you're going back to school to get your masters or something. (Or if you're into it using Differential Equations to analyze brain waives........)
Major in whatever you want that will allow you to maintain a steady 3.5+ and social life.
Just know accounting like I know your sister.
They don't help in banking but some of them (CS and Engineering in particular) give you more options and backup plans.
Not having a strong technical and mathematical foundation also limits some of your options. The fact that I don't have a Math or Physics PhD at a top ten school and did not do my undergrad at Polytechnique means I will never be a pricing quant on an exotics desk. I'm ok with that. But there are a number of career tracks- even in finance- that are open to STEM people but not finance/Accy majors (maybe Econ if you get it at the right school and do enough math)
Finally, some of these "easy" degrees give you options that Engineers don't have. Accounting majors have the ultimate put option on the economy- become CPAs and do Big Four Audit. As long as the S&P 500 exists, there will always be demand for auditors.
I still say push yourself and do what you find interesting. In high school, I found programming interesting. I studied CS. After graduating, I found finance, stats, and optimization interesting. I did an MFE.
The one thing that I will point out is that it's easier to learn math, science, and technical stuff at 20 than it is at 30. Careers also tend to move from quantitative to qualitative. So if you've always dreamed of being a programmer, it may be wise to plan on doing that now rather than in 20 years.
Um...do the majors that 1) are applicable to what you want to do after school, and 2) interest you. Then, you study and do well because the topics should be something that you are passionate about.
"Like, I want to work as an auditor, but, I chose to study aerospace engineering with a concentration in quantum mechanical light force, because, it sounds cool, and the auditors will hire me because of it" -- half of WSO
Becoming a master of coding is an intellectual challenge. Understanding how a HashMap works, the different ways to implement it, and Java's treatment of HashMaps is a helluvalot more interesting than building models in Excel to me.
And on the nitty-gritty stuff, I'd rather add a small feature to a piece of code than to change the formatting on a pitch book.
I guess there's a lot of different personalities out there, and mine is the kind that enjoys understanding how seemingly complicated stuff works and also building stuff (not necessarily getting every detail perfect- just getting every detail working well). To me landing at Google is extremely straightforward and it would be an awesome place to work, and being an analyst at GS sounds like two years of misery.
This is correct. I did not really find the tech interview process to be that challenging. Then again, I didn't find finance interviews to be that difficult either, so I think the difference ends up being that tech interviews, compared to high finance interviews, are meritocratic. There's no notion of networking, behavioral interviews, info sessions, etc. If you know your data structures and algorithms, and you've done a couple of cool projects involving programming, and you have the ability to take the famous algorithms and adapt them to solve a new problem in an interview, you'll get the job.
What's the catch? I think IlliniProgrammer is underestimating the challenge of knowing enough computer science and programming to be able to say that you actually know your data structures and algorithms and can come up with derivatives on the fly in a programming interview. This is not a matter of reading the Vault guide for investment banking. This is a matter of understanding, proving, and implementing the classic algorithms.
The finance barriers to entry are behavioral, networking, etc. The tech barrier to entry is simply the amount of time you need to sink into the subject to be able to ace the interview.
Semi related question- I have the ability to do a joint major in accounting and finance, but I just find accounting boring as hell most of the time. Is it worth it to grind it out and get the additional accounting component? I know it would be beneficial, but I'm not sure to what extent. Any thoughts?
I do not absolutely love programming. Sometimes I find it grinding. I certainly found many aspects of it grinding in school, but I also saw the opportunities for creativity. But for me it ended up being a net plus at the end of the day. All else being equal, I'd rather be writing code than doing nothing. If you don't feel that way about Accounting, don't study it.
If you are good at math, you have a lot of options. If you're a little good at Math and Statistics, there's Actuarial Science. Moving up the math chain, there's Computer Science and Computer Engineering, then Statistics and ORFE. These degrees all lead to great careers that might be less boring than Accounting.
To those who say that finance interviews are not (or are less) meritocratic than the tech one - you are wrong. Excluding the cases where you get some help from a pre-existing family connection or something like that, the interview process is very meritocratic if you think about it.
Networking, connecting with people, being likable (incl. kissing ass), presenting yourself in a beneficial light et cetera - these are all essential qualities in finance and professional services in general. Yes, as an analyst you are hired to do grunt work mostly, but then let's be objective - anybody with a quarter of a brain could do an analyst's job. Modeling, powerpoint and research aren't exactly any kind of rocket science. So they're just hiring people they're going to like to work with, while also keeping in mind the criteria on which more senior bankers would be judged (see above).
Also, I'm not exactly sure if this is true in IB, but in consulting projects are usually pitched/sold with a team attached, and since they can't put "did X projects in the same/related field" next to your name, they want to at least be able to put a well-known school next to it so that the client doesn't feel ripped off.
The problem is that networking can't be used very effectively to promote social welfare- certainly not as effectively as the math and sciences or engineering disciplines. Don't take it from me- take it from all of the people out there who hate the networking aspects of banking. In a technical interview, you are demonstrating your ability to build and create stuff, which can create social value. I don't really see the pie getting bigger through networking in the same way most people agree it gets bigger through technology that creates or conserves more resources.
People may argue with me a little bit on this, but I think it's extremely difficult to make a case that there's a stronger connection between getting paid and creating social value on jobs that involve networking than there is in jobs that
And the problem with our economy today is that we have too many people networking and not enough people building. That's part of the reason why decent coders are graduating from undergrad to take comp packages (after options) of $150K/year at firms on the west coast to work 55-60 hours/week. People with strong technical skills may very well have more merit than bankers- at least with our economy's current needs, and the job market reflects that.
Which may explain why there's some controversy about how competent consultants actually are and the value of hiring them. The bottom line is that for most important jobs (IE ones that involve fixing things or making stuff), an engineer from UMich or Georgia Tech or Berkeley can probably do it better than nearly anyone from an elite but fluffy school, regardless of their major.I think it's one thing to try and sell dumb money something; it's another thing to actually build something. You want your sales guy to be from Yale; you want the people actually doing the building to be from Carnegie Mellon or MIT or a state school (ok, or maybe Cornell)- somewhere with a real engineering school. Fortunately for the world, today's economy favors people doing the building.
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