At a crossroads with my undergrad major

Hello all,

I am currently in the "something in finance" purgatory stage of my academic career and am trying to solidify my major. I am a sophomore and have spent my entire time at college (a non-name state school) completing my core curriculum. Having done this, I am starting to think my "undecided business admin" major might not be the best thing to continue. I have not taken any major-specific classes yet, but I will this upcoming semester, so I need to make a decision pretty soon. As of now, I am considering dual majoring in finance and business management. However, I am also thinking of going down a more unorthodox path toward finance by majoring in mechanical engineering or applied math. I currently have a 4.0 GPA, which isn't exactly hard to do when all you have taken is core classes, but I know I could maintain a higher GPA as a bus/fin major than in ME or math. So I am unsure if the drop in GPA will be with it.  I am also toying with the idea of minoring in math or maybe dual majoring in finance and math. 


Any advice would be greatly appreciated. 

 

If you can stomach it - learn to code. Learning to code is basically the same as math. If you're good at writing and solving equations, you just need to "rewrite" the variables using computer language to achieve similar results. If you combine this with learning finance, which should be a cakewalk if you're good with numbers, then that opens you up to consulting, biz dev, banking, along with big tech, software, data, and a lot of product management roles. All of these are very lucrative and once you experiment with what you like you can delve deeper. 

If you can't stomach code, then explore. Try developing social skills to help you network and get good opportunities for the next 2-3 years of college. Unless you plan to do quant stuff, research or a PhD, you don't need to kill yourself (& your GPA) with hard courses in college. Most of the stuff you do postgrad is taught to you during training and onboarding and all of the complex jazz gets forgotten if you don't end up in a field where you don't use it consistently.

 

I think you should double major in finance and math. This would be very impressive. 

"If you always put limits on everything you do, physical or anything else, it will spread into your work and into your life. There are no limits. There are only plateaus, and you must not stay there, you must go beyond them." - Bruce Lee
 

This does have a nice ring to it. I'm pretty decent at math and made As or Bs in every math class I've ever taken. Granted, nothing higher than Calc 1 so I am unsure how well I'd do in some of the higher level courses. 

 

No offense but if you're an incoming sophomore and you haven't taken higher than Calc 1 then math most definitely isn't for you. Not saying it's impossible but I just question whether the effort and likely GPA tank is worth it if your end goal is finance. The fact of the matter is, the later one gets into math, the harder it is. The kind of math in US primary schools is not actual math; it's just plugging and chugging basic algorithms for computations that don't actually build any useful intuition in writing proofs. Maybe look into an intro text like "Book of Proof" or "Analysis 1" and see if it interests you. At my college, most math majors take the real analysis sequence as sophomores---and as someone who finished Calc 3 in sophomore year of high school, I can tell you that math major courses are an entire universe away from Calc 3 in terms of mathematical maturity and intuition required, let alone Calc 1.

 

Had this same train of thought this past year. Ultimately, study a field or combination of majors that you actually enjoy, but still gives you some quantitative edge. Ideally try to find a combo that shows off your skills but also what makes you unique. 

 

Agree with @mynamejefferies. If you have legitimate curiosity in anything deeper than business classes (which was the case for me) I would switch out of the business school. In engineering and STEM fields you will gain truly marketable skills and come out with a degree that signifies you aren't a retarded. For me the finance major felt like a deadend, and similar to you, it took up until my sophomore year to realize it. By the end of my sophomore year I began pursuing a math minor and took some programming courses. Ultimately I wish I had just started as an applied math major. 

While I still ended up in a fine position internship wise—although less prestigious than many on this sub—it is certainly not high finance. In my opinion business school is what people that hate studying major in because the classes are easy/mindless and schedules are manageable. The career path following a business degree is also straight forward and at least guarantees an average job if you are a B student. This lack of time commitment for business majors opens up time for networking, higher (inflated) GPA's, and the ability to build life stories or hobbies which help with fitting into the business world and interviews. 

STEM majors have it more difficult in regards to curriculum and the maintenance of a high GPA...which is important for banking (and especially if you are non-target looking to break-in). What STEM majors do have is a permanent stamp on their forehead that states intellectually business school was not enough. It says not only did you work hard through long hours, but you did so on problems that most people shy away from due to the sheer abstraction and difficulty such as solving a differential equations or programming a decision tree algorithm

 

Going against the grain here -- if you want to work in a finance job, then stick with a finance major. You want to maintain the highest GPA possible to be competitive in the finance field and keep your options open. Your school also might have a finance club/investment club that you can join and they usually only limit it to people in the business school -- I went to a rank 300 type of state school but they had a competitive program like this and everyone in it landed really good jobs. 

I have a feeling the people on this forum who consistently advocate majoring in engineering/comp sci/math and even dualling it with a finance major probably didn't go higher than Calc 1 in college. It really doesn't make sense to major in engineering or math if you're set on working a finance job, quite honestly.

Use that extra time in your finance curriculum to network, get solid internships locally during the school year/summer, and polish up your soft skills -- those will be far more important for breaking into the finance world. 

For reference, I was exactly in this situation at a super non-target and contemplated doing comp sci or engineering thinking it would make me more competitive. I stuck with finance and focused on the above, and everything worked out -- I'm sure it will for you too.

Just my .02, good luck!

 

Completely agree with this

If you might have some interest in a really mathy or quant job, fine, do math. But finance/math double major just does not have the prestige you think it would for finance jobs. If your GPA suffers (3.7 is fine, but you can easily fall down to a 3.5/3.6 from one hard class) you will have more difficulty in recruiting. GPA >>>>> major for finance, the effort to benefit ratio of doing a hard second major is just extremely low. 

IMO take the finance major, get involved on campus, and use the extra time for internships/recruiting/networking. At a no name state school your soph fall should be spent networking hard and being involved in clubs, not worrying about tough math classes.

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