Which Undergrad Classes Matter?
I checked through the forums and didn't see anything that matched up with this.
Let's be honest here. While we all go to different schools which all teach certain topics to different depth and detail levels, the general concepts and curriculums are essentially the same. SO: As undergrads entering into the Investment Banking world, are there certain classes and topics as a rule that we should be extra mindful of and stay sharp on? And are there certain classes that, after school, you never touch the concepts from again?
Personally I'm still learning more about different career paths, so whatever your experience is in (trading, corp finance, HF, M&A, PE, etc), just specify and let us know what you wish you'd spent more/less time remembering!
Syntax was the hardest class I took in undergrad. Now that I'm out of school, I refer back to what I learned there much more than I thought I would (a few times a week, at least). It was a mid-level Linguistics class and we studied word order and sentence structure. More specifically, we would map relationships between words in a sentence, look for ambiguity in writing and try to deduce all the possible meanings in these ambiguous sentences. So, we'd take a simple sentence like this one:
"I saw a man on a hill with a telescope."
and try to understand all the possible interpretations of such a statement:
There’s a man on a hill, and I’m watching him with my telescope. There’s a man on a hill, who I’m seeing, and he has a telescope. I’m on a hill, and I saw a man using a telescope.
and so on.
It's an immensely helpful class when it comes to writing clearly for business and personal purposes. Clear and succinct writing is a rarity these days.
Sex ed back in junior year. Had bitches on my urethra.