asdf - Economics

I chose economics for my undergrad for 2 reasons: 1) it is way more interesting than memorising accounting rules and 2) any of the useful content from accounting can be self-taught on the job or acquired through the analyst training programs. In the end, neither puts you on a better foot but I would recommend studying the one you are more interested in, which, given the breadth of your economics subjects, seems like the way to go. Game theory is fucking cool too.

Economics.

Econ, more interesting, more useful.

Some parts of accounting will help you tremendously, most will be totally useless.

Your taxation class will likely take a lot of time, be fairly challenging and absolutely useless. Your Managerial (Cost Accounting) class will probably be the same. The financial theory classes will prob be challenging and 80% irrelevant.

Economics will likely be mostly irrelevant to, but I think it would help you more in the long run in IB. Taking a capital markets and possibly forecasting (not sure what this class is) could potentially be interesting and good knowledge.

My comments above are for IB only. I actually think accounting is more useful overall, just not for IB. If you're going to end up in F500 finance or many other roles I'd argue that accounting is better.

Do econ but I highly recommend using elective credits to take intermediate accounting. I don't think you need much more beyond that.

I concentrated in finance and accounting and found the accounting classes helpful, although the acc. classes I took were more beneficial than the ones you have to take, based on what you said. It helped to have a better understanding of the financial statements. Having said that, a lot of what was in the acc. classes was useless and I wanted to kill myself every day I was in them. Econ is definitely more interesting. I agree with kjl, if you take econ try to take an acc. class or two as well.

If you want to work in banking and want your courses to best prepare you for a career in the business, I highly suggest accounting (though if you want to work in trading, as noted above, econ makes sense). If you can enter the training program with a very solid understanding of accounting concepts, you will be way ahead of the game. It helps during training (you'll be mainly concerned with learning modeling and Excel, while others will mainly be focused on understanding accounting) which will give you a leg up, and it will certainly help when you get down into analyzing financial statements, building models and performing various valuations.

Can you take accounting classes without having an accounting concentration? If so, I'd do that -- tax is a bitch simply because there is so much material crammed into a semester. It's a huge time commitment and not really worth it in any way. I'd recommend financial accounting, intermediate accounting (may or may not be two classes) and advanced accounting (at least at may school, we covered merger accounting in this class, which was very beneficial). If you have any interest in restructuring, I'd take business law if you have the opportunity (won't get terribly in-depth, but we covered restructurings, reorganizations and bankruptcies for about six weeks). Maybe try to find the class' syllabus to see if that stuff is covered. And if you ever think you may have interest in working in industry, I think managerial/cost accounting can be useful -- you can pretty much derive everything in this class from your other accounting classes, but it provides a unique way of looking at things. Also helps if you work in middle market and occasionally have clients whom you have to build an operating model for.

HOWEVER... at the end of the day, I think you should take something that interests you, not something that will prep you for banking. While I definitely think you should get a few accounting courses in, you should have your "minor" concentration be something you find interesting. If that means literature, go for it. Computer science? Why not. If you think Micro & Macro Theory, Game Theory, and Business Forecasting will be more interesting, then go for it.

Just about the only thing you learn in school that you will ever use in investment banking comes from what you learn in accounting classes. Whether or not this should be the deciding factor in your major is another story. I think JimbrowngoU hit it pretty much on the head.

Everyone I know who went to banking straight from undergrad was either finance AND accounting double major, or econ.

Thanks everyone so much for the comments. This is really valuable input.

I may just go with economics since I am definitely more interested in it compared to accounting. Microecon will probably be useless, but I've heard that macroeconomics is helpful in understanding the news, etc.

What I've gathered so far is that accounting can help you stay above the game initially, but it seems that interns without an in-depth understanding of accounting can learn and catch up pretty rapidly too.

If I do go with econ and finance, I probably will not fit any additional accounting classes into my schedule since they are difficult and may pull down my GPA. But it will depend on what's taught, so I'll have to look that up.

Anyway, thanks again guys for your opinions!