Major for S&T/PT/HF
Should I double major in Economics and Finance with a Math minor. Or should I just double major in Economics and Mathematics?
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Fuck double majoring, you’ll fuck your gpa. Major in finance, and minor in math or econ. Remember GPA is king my friend. I doubled and fucked my gpa, and had to work five times harder than everyone else.
agreed...a double major only makes sense if you can pull off a high GPA.
before you choose a major, you should be laser specifc on exactly what you want to do for your career. college costs a lot of money....don't go in blind...have a purpose.
There are a thousand different jobs in finance....you need to get hyper laser specific...and then get educated for THAT job
Major in econ, minor in math. Finance at most schools is not a very rigorous major at the undergraduate level.
Focus your math coursework on statistics/optimization/simulation/linear algebra. PDE/stochastics if you want to be a quant. Avoid proof-based stuff- it is not very useful relative to how difficult it is. You want as much of your math to be "applied" as possible.
Also take some programming/data science classes. Knowing Python well out of undergrad is a real benefit.
Thanks. This is what I figured. For more info, I'm a rising sophomore. Throughout freshman year, I was a finance major and I looked at the coursework that I would be taking and realized that I pretty much know most of this from books that I have read and from self-study. I think Econ/Math would be my best bet. It's more rigorous and a better investment.
Just make sure you're doing applied Math...pure mathematics will be tough, it'll involve a lot of proof based courses like real analysis which DO NOT believe in grade inflation. I think econ is a waste. There are a million Econ majors on my floor, and they all don't know shit quantitatively. I was double finance/applied math, so I've got a good perspective.
Unfortunately PDE/Stochastic calculus is not only quant related. I find hard being in S&T and not understanding properly how for example your gamma (2nd derivative) is changing, or why other greeks metrics change. Also, a lot of banks have internal vol models based on stochvol... And this without mentioning classic nonlinear products pricing
Agreed for the other
Finance and accounting would be a good double major if you want to go into investment banking.
However, for sales and trading, economics and some kind of math / statistics would be better.
Although I am pretty confident that I am more interested in trading, I am still interested in the world of investment banking. Would it be a disadvantage to not have been a Finance major, like I originally was? I just felt that the finance undergrad program at my school was not very rigorous, besides the advanced corporate finance class. Either way, should I just stick with Economics and Math? I have a great interest in both topics.
What about Econ/Finance with a math minor, where I take strictly applied math classes. If I do the full on math major, I will have to take a lot of useless and abstract pure math courses
If you want to do IB or client-oriented stuff, do something that gets you high grades.
Anything else in finance: math/computer science and self-study finance/economics (very easy).
Good point. I came into college with a lot of credits and just finished freshman year. If I a double majored in Econ/Finance (only a few extra courses, not a big deal) and minored in Mathematics, would this be better? Keep in mind the math major it my school is pure math and is rather abstract. If I minor I can just take applied courses like multivariable calc, linear algebra, diff eq, probability/stats, and operations research. Would this be the most effective method? I feel that if I double major Econ/Math, I miss out on finance classes and end up taking useless pure math courses.
econ and accounting would be more practical. you'll be doing some accounting stuff in IB, so it'll be helpful...and if you ever go to PE, VC, L/S equity hedge...then accounting background will come in handy.
Good point, but the finance program at my school is fairly heavy in accounting anyway, so the only thing accounting majors take that we don't is taxation, auditing, and managerial
Agreed finance is really not a very rigorous course path for most undergraduate programs, though obviously there are exceptions. Anecdotally, statistics, econometrics, or any other applied mathematics tend to lend to the kind of work that those on trading desks/prop shops like to look for. As others have said, I'd avoid the double major because unless you're planning on being able to balance that workload, GPA is king. Focus that extra time on picking up some hard skills to complement your one major.
Yeah makes a lot of sense. Thats why ill prob go with Econ/fin double major (it's not a hard double major, my gpa will remain high) with a minor in math, but all applied math. Thanks for the insight.
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