Recently, a few of my school alums came into my school and spoke to us about their lives in IB, PE, VC, etc. After a great conversation with them, they revealed their college majors and I became baffeled. While they mostly had connections to the front office, I was wondering whether social skills and good GPA for a fluffy major are better than a low 3 in a finance major.
Any feedback is appreciated, thanks!
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major doesn't really matter all that much
If you want to leave options open for tech or quant analytics, do CS, Computer Engineering, maybe Math or Physics (depending on your school). The math required for these degrees also opens a lot of doors in graduate school (everything from a Finance PhD to a CS PhD to Sociology-- nearly all of the social and even some of the physical sciences) that a liberal arts undergrad wouldn't offer.
The secret is to pick a challenging major but take fluffy electives. When I'm looking at an Engineering or Math major's resume, I generally (depending on the school, but this is especially true if it's a state school, private engineering school, or lesser-known private school) cut the GPA shortage from 4.0 by 1/2 relative to a non-quantitative finance major. And I don't have time to do attribution by course. The major is the only summary statistic that most people look at for the difficulty of the GPA.
But it depends on you, what you're good at, and what your school is good at. If you're a decent (but not incredible) grind at a decent state school (top 100 US News), and have a head for mathematics, engineering or CS is often a non-horrible choice.
Inverse relation with rank of school would be a decent general rule.
weight 1-10 with 1 being best tier
Rank of School: 1 Relevancy of Major: 10
Rank of School: 8 Relevancy of Major: 3
If you go to Harvard for history, you will still have an opportunity to work in IB. If you go to the a school outside the top 150, they aren't really going to look at a history guy
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