Minor in Finance v. Business Consulting

Hello, I'm current a sophomore at a semi / regional target. I transferred in last semester and suspect that I should be able to finish with a pretty strong GPA. However, I was originally planning on going to law school and am currently majoring in history. Recently, though, I've been thinking about other possible career options namely finance or consulting, and want to dip my feet in at the very least. Due to transferring, I'm in all likelihood going to take up to an extra semester or two. Hopefully, this should allow me to get a business minor and have an additional summer to gain work experience. My main goals by doing so are to are to see if it appeals to me, as well as, having something business related on my resume to secure summer internships / potential post grad employment if I go down that route.

I would say from what I've read online I'm more interested in consulting, but I'm totally in the dark and really have no idea. However, I think I'm leaning towards the finance minor. Outside of a core class on management consulting, most of the courses in the minor are things like 'Team Work' or 'Negotiating.' Whereas, the finance minor has things that I think would be more beneficial such as accounting, private equity, economics, investing, ect,. Also it seems like finance might help more with summer internships. I plan on supplementing whatever I choose with some degree of self-study.

So what should I go for? I feel I'm making the decision somewhat blind, but I'm leaning towards finance even though I see myself more interested in consulting.

4 Comments
 

I was a Poli Sci/Econ major in school and originally pre-law as well. I loved my political theory classes and my professor, but if I could do it all over again, I would just keep it as a minor and make my major in business. If you love history, I would recommend changing majors and keeping history as a minor. You're only a sophomore - you should be fine.

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Best Response

I could probably do a double major in Business or Econ, but unless it would be a big advantage (which it sounds like it might) I'd prefer not to. In terms of Business I think there's a lot of classes that don't really appeal to me or are pretty generic. I'd be more inclined to double major in Econ, but the main thing that's holding me back is having to take like 2 to 3 prerequisite courses just in order to take the single math requirement (didn't take Calc in HS). Other than that I think Econ could potentially drop my GPA a point or two, as I've heard the classes can be pretty tough. Doing a minor, especially Finance, would be nice since I'd be pretty interested in the all the courses and I don't think it would hurt my GPA. Since I'll be basically finished with my own major / all my other requirements next year, I have a lot of flexibility. At one point I was even think about double majoring in History and Philosophy with the minor in Finance, but it sounds like I should just do a double major with Business or Econ instead. How would employers interpret HIST/PHIL/FinanceMinor v. HIST/ECON double major?

I just checked, and it looks like there's actually the same math requirement for Business which make the double major unfeasible simply due to the number of credits that would be required (Econ is significantly less).

So it looks like my choices are:

(1)HIST/ECON v. (2)HIST/FinanceMinor/ConsultingMinor v. (3)HIST/PHIL/ConsultingOrFinanceMinor

  1. Would probably look best to employers, but possibly challenging. Could damage GPA. Only one math requirement, but 2 to 3 prerequisites for that one requirement.
  2. Would let me get a feel for both finance and consulting, relatively easy and interesting. Not sure how it would look on resume.
  3. Relatively easy to obtain since there's some overlap between the two majors. Would probably gain strong writing / reasoning skills. Somewhat easy and interesting, but might not show enough interest in business.
 

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