What College Major ??
Hey everyone, I was watching a video on YouTube yesterday and 2 investment bankers who worked at SunTrust were walking through what investment banking is, work politics, what college you should go to, and what major choose to.
What I was confused about was that both of these investment bankers tried to convince college students to choose a skillset-related major rather than just Finance/Economics.
Their argument was that Investment Banking only takes like 6 months to learn (financial modeling, analysis, pitchbooks). Now, both of these investment banking analysts quit their jobs and created a company related to Tech because of the growth they saw in tech.
They feel more fulfilled in their work and are paid more since they get to control work hours and compensation as it is their company.
They highly suggested students to major in a skillset-related major such as Computer Science, Statistics, or Data Science so that if they choose to start their own company, they would be better off than just majoring in finance.
However, as a student interested in Investment Banking, I'm purely interested in finance and I'm driven by the qualitative side of business such as executive leadership of a company, cash flow, spreadsheets, total revenue, growth potential, etc. I'm really not interested in learning Python, JavaScript, or C++ for a quantitative finance role.
I really want to stay focused on finance, market news, and focus on relevant work experience during my college years rather than experiment with a computer science major and end up screwing my GPA.
My end goal is to create my own hedge fund and become a billionaire even though it sounds kind of stupid at this young age.
What is your view on this and what do you suggest I doing?
It doesn't sound like you enjoy quant stuff, so why do it just because someone on youtube said it's better?
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I'm enrolled in AP computer science but I don't enjoy it at all
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In college try finance and independent research studies specializing with a professor in that field you want to learn more about. It’ll help with interviews as a talking point. (Side note, never cap how long it take you to “learn” to do a job. There’s always something new to learn in the front office.)
If you're good enough at math and statistics, I think the financial modeling can be learned fairly quickly. But stuff like coding, etc takes a bit more time to learn, perhaps this is why the bankers recommended other majors?
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Any course that teaches multivariate and logistic analyses (typically 2nd level stats)
Literally, major in whatever you're most interested in learning over 4 years. Whether that's history, econ, government, CS, finance, Maths, engineering.. you'll more likely get solid grades if you care about what you're learning; finance/consulting recruiting ultimately boils down to school prestige, grades, ECs, work experience and interviewing skills.
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Depends on what school you go to. If you are at Harvard you could honestly do whatever you want, but if you are at most schools you have to choose. First, find what you like doing. I would go the finance +___ path where maybe you go comp sci, math, or something else. if you want to go HF then math and comp sci seem to be the wave
Dang really? I can't go to a HF or create one without a comp sci background
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