I always hear people say that Finance is an easy major compared to something technical like CS or engineering, but is it really? I know a lot of finance majors who don't understand how to make sense of a yield curve, or why CAPM isn't the only way to get the expected rate of return on equity. Not to mention if your degree is a double major in Accounting (which mine was), you also have to learn how to audit, make financial statements, and read up on the basics of business law.
Granted, my CS peers were spending a lot more time in their dorms doing various assignments and prepping for quizzes, but their material was mostly just getting the gist of a concept and then powering through problem sets to really hammer it in. In Finance (like in Econ), you need to develop an overall intuition of things which is somewhat similar to philosophy.
I'm saying this as someone who has taken a couple courses in computer science at my uni, learned stuff like advanced probability theory and linear algebra, and knows the fundamentals of C++, Python, and SQL. Stuff like Finance and Econ (not gonna include Accounting for obvious reasons) always make me think more originally and creatively when compared to CS or Engineering.
Interested to hear other people's thoughts on this.
Based on the most helpful WSO content, the perception of finance being "easy" compared to technical majors like CS or engineering is subjective and depends on individual strengths, interests, and career goals. Here's a breakdown of key insights:
Finance vs. Technical Majors:
Accounting and Finance Overlap:
Creativity and Intuition in Finance:
Workload and Difficulty:
Career Relevance:
In summary, finance may not have the same technical rigor as CS or engineering, but it requires a unique blend of analytical, creative, and intuitive skills. The difficulty of any major ultimately depends on your interests, career aspirations, and willingness to put in the effort to excel.
STEM material competency usually pushes a 3.0 - 3.5 GPA which is good
Finance requires 3.5 - 4.0 GPA
So technically financiers have a more thorough knowledge and competency of the information. So it's just different. You can cruise in finance with a 3.5 GPA, but to get to top shops you need a 3.9-4.0 GPA on average. So higher attention to detail in a sense.
Now here come all the people that got 2.8s and 3.0s to say yOu DoNt nEEd a 3.5+ GPA, but remember you are the outliers!!! Peace.
Hey youre the schizo who made that horrible employee nickname post, that made me sick.
Also STEM GPAs can be counteracted with a lot of work experience (internships and competence). I had a comp sci roommate who was in the 2.5-2.9 GPA range but was always working throughout college. Ended up in a job after graduating for a role that paid low 6 figures (converted to today's money), ~80-90K back then.
"Is Finance Really That Easy Compared To Other Majors?"
Yes. It is absolutely easy compared to pretty much every more technical field. For reference, I got three different majors in undergrad (finance, accounting, and business analytics), went to law school, and am in the process of a graduate-level engineering degree.
Here is just one example of how finance is much easier than other technical fields.
If you take a step back and really think about it, there is only a handful of core "basic" concepts in finance and the rest is basically just the application of those ideas.
If you (truly) understand some basic accounting (A=L+E, how expenses/revenue/costs/etc flow through the financial statements), intermediate-level Excel skills (if statements, sumifs, h/v/x lookup), time value of money, basic option greeks, what a bond and stock is, and the concept of benchmarking, you pretty much have the basics of like 90% of finance down. Just about everything else is the application of these pretty basic ideas and skills.
That's not to say "everything else is the application" is easy. I am not saying that. But if you look at the raw ideas themselves, the core ideas of finance are not that difficult.
As a general matter, this is not the case in more technical fields.
Finance is definitely easier from a technical standpoint than CS or engineering. It may be the hardest business major outside of accounting, but most of what I learned in school was how to do a DCF and frameworks for understanding equity/fixed income. Not easy per say, but really just required some effort and repetition.
I also think that technical skill is just not as important in finance. People skills are what will ultimately get you jobs in high finance and consulting (networking, interviews, etc.), whereas in CS and engineering you just have to be competent. People don't care in these fields if you're a bit awkward.
Nothing I've learning in finance was as conceptually or mechanically difficult as my fluid mechanics and heat transfer classes. And I didn't even take orbital mechanics, just looking at my friends homework gave me a headache.
Heat transfer bent my brain until I started to visualize heat as "tiny heat particles" that move through matter according to diffusion or transport. The higher the concentration of heat particles, the higher the temperature. The math works the same, and the gradients act the same, so that made it easier for me to visualize. The analogy breaks down but it got me through transport phenomena.
That's also the only way I got through circuits. Once I recognized that capacitors and inductors worked the same as springs and dampers in a mechanical system (at least as far as the math was concerned) then I could make it work.
One of my roommates was in a graduate mechanical engineering class called "vibrations." It looked like they invented new math for it. At some level all of those classes go "ahh, we give up" and you just build models that get you pretty close. We had a professor who was the world expert in granular flow (like how dried corn flows out of a silo), and even he admitted he was wrong but got pretty close.
Anyways, except for the farthest reaches of quantitative finance, all of this is way harder than anything in a normal undergraduate finance curriculum. I was one of a handful of undergrad engineering majors in my business school class - you should have seen what we did to the grading curve in our business statistics class.
Linear System Dynamics, or LSD for short lol. Good times. You have to use "state space" which is like this algebraic transformation of linear system integrals. It does make the math easier to deal with, but the conversion process and the logic is completely upside down from everything you've learned before.
The biggest problem I had with heat transfer was breaking the PDE into an ODE since you're dealing with both Navier-Stokes and conduction. Figuring out which one to hold constant and solve the ODE was not fun lol.
We’re adding and subtracting in finance.
Engineering has a bunch of hieroglyphic math symbols that idk wtf stands for. STEM is definitely harder.
I don’t know how US Finance courses work, but at least in my uni in the UK, Finance isn’t that easy, we do learn moderately complex concepts like sticky and flexible price monetary models, Marshall Lerner condition, bond immunisation, Taylor series for VaR and Yield changes, Diamond Dybvig model and the downstream derivations of it, etc etc. I’m sure it’s easier than pure maths courses but it’s not just like the CAPM and basic accounting stuff either
Depending on BS degrees it will be easier than Acturial Sciences, Engineering or a Mathmatics degree. But will be harder than an accounting degree or Economics degree. Unless the Economics degree is a econometrics data science focus. It depends on the school as well. Now when you get to masters programs, most Finance degrees are Quant or Econometric focused and far harder than a MBA/5th year accounting focus etc. In my masters classes the core classes all the MBA candidates would drop week two it was too hard for them, but our program had 2 labs that could get them a bunch of their requirements so they'd all sign up. So it's all relative.
Asking how hard finance is isn’t the right question.
The question is, how much finance do you need to get hired at top shops.
For quant shops, you better have PhD in STEM from a top university.
For IB, it’s better to be lacrosse player, Ivy educated and possess a trust fund, well-tailored clothes and great manners/social skills. If you’re planning to work in Europe, being a titled aristocrat is very helpful. If you have these, knowing a little something about finance, economics and accounting is icing on the cake.
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