Double Majoring in Accounting?
Hello! I'm interested in eventually recruiting for midsize REPE funds (50-100 people, 1-5bn AUM) in an asset management + acquisitions role. Currently, I'm a freshman at a target school who is majoring in finance and accounting with a minor in RE. Should I drop the accounting double, since it's only going to hurt my GPA (currently a 3.78), or do you think it could be useful for recruiting later on? All advice is greatly appreciated.
Thank you!
Bump
I don’t think accounting materially helps with your immediate goal of becoming a REPE analyst after college, especially if you are doing finance and minoring in RE.
Accounting will help you if you end up pivoting to a CFO and/or CRE (or asset intensive) start up role later in your career. In those situations, you’ll be doing the financials yourself, or overseeing a small team, or building a finance team for reporting, accounts payables, and revenues - as you scale. Sometimes all of these through your company’s lifecycle.
If you get a MBA later on, you could probably get a waiver from accounting class, and replace that with an elective. I did that (I had a MAcc and CPA license to easily show I didn’t need a MBA accounting class).
As a start up, it will be harder to justify paying you a salary if your only job was to “find deals.” That’s why, an accounting skillset “pays the bills” literally, because that gives you recurring work, say if your firm has some legacy assets under management. You can later specialize out of overseeing accounting once there is abundant cash flow, and can hire the right people. Happened to me, and we hired VP of Accounting/Finance and CFO to take over from me (I’m a great 0 to 1 CFO), so I can just work on new deals and endeavors.
I also like to apply the “professional skepticism” that accounting programs/work experience (namely audit) hammer into you, when doing due diligence on a new entity (acquisition and management opportunities).
This career comes with its twists and turns. Accounting has paid my bills during recessions and gave me a major role in start ups.
My mid-career advice is be versatile. It’s a jungle out there.
If you never leave corporate REPE then you probably don’t need. But how can you predict that? Also, if you hate accounting, then perhaps don’t do it. I liked it and actually think it’s a better business field of study than undergrad finance where you’re learning about portfolio theory and things less relevant to CRE. That’s my hot take.
Thanks for the excellent reply. I like your reasoning, and I feel like long term that accounting could be beneficial, and there's a good shot it will help me more than the GPA hit will hurt me.
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