The numbers side of business - blah
Hello all, new member here.
Anyway, Im starting freshman year at college in the business program. I go to what i consider a pretty good school. Ive read its pretty wise to keep anonymous on the forum, so Ill just say its a top 50 business school, and a top 50 school in the states according to all rankings.
Anyway, Ive always been very attracted to the creative side of business - advertising, marketing, campaigns, and Ive always wanted to become a creative director or a marketing manager for a company.
However, my business curriculum is very rigorous in the numbers part of business....accounting, financing, economics. And ultimately, by the end of the year Im going to have a pick a concentration area for business. Aka, do I want be in marketing, or do I want to be in accounting.
My question is, has anyone tried to take both career paths (creative and quantitative) in business after/during college, and which one did you find offered more/better job opportunities. I would love to hear any opinions or experiences.
My conflict is that I am very good at the creative side of business. I have impeccable communication and presentation skills, and I am very interesting in marketing and advertising. However, I feel the job field is much more ambiguous and harder to break into than if I were to focus on accounting, financing, economics...
Marketing gets you a job at burger king.
And I'm not just some asshole giving you a smart ass quip. That's the truth. Marketing majors generally go nowhere.
Also, it's much much easier to major in finance or accounting and break into marketing than vice versa. Like many people, my sister is in sales and wishes she'd stuck it out and majored in finance even though she had no love for the subject. I've seen lots of sales guys with finance/accounting majors, it helped them break into the sales side of finance more than a marketing degree would have. You can always learn marketing later, it's all common sense really. That's all I've got. Choose wisely, you only do college once.
I would honestly have to disagree to a certain extent. I think just as many finance/accounting majors end up at "burger king" jobs. Obviously there is going to be a bias on this forum, which specializes in finance, but you even have to admit that a lot of college is how much effort you put it into. With the right grades, the right networking, and the proper skill set, im sure one can go further with a focus on marketing than just "burger king". Just as in finance, Im sure those that clowned around in college are in "burger king" jobs as well.
Thank you though for the response, I do appreciate it. While I disagree on the extremity of your opinion, I do see its validity.
Also, while the marketing courses in your program may or may not reflect it, marketing requires much more analytics/quantitative comfort than you'd likely expect.
Completely understand. Fortunately, our business program gives you a good dose of everything, and even with picking a concentration, you still practice a good amount of accounting, financing, and economics. Because of that, I'll be walking out with a general business degree, just with more knowledge on certain parts. Ultimately, I'll have to use that knowledge to chisel down to a more specific subject in business.
This is true. I chose a MS in Marketing over a MS in Economics because most people who get MS in Economics who do not become government economists join corporations in either Economics, Finance or Market Research. If marketing is a major of choice, I would probably minor in statistics.
Plus, According to the BLS, there is a 41% increase in the need for Market Research Analysts...It will pay nowhere near finance though.
I would do neither and would do something STEM if I had to do it all over again. Those are the things that you're not going to easily learn on the job.
You know 80% of everything you need to know about marketing right now...most of it is common sense. The rest of it is data mining for targeting. I agree with the other guys above.. You may not end up flipping burgers at Burger King, but you may be figuring out what coupons you should be delivering on the take-away bag or the paper tray cover for the Burger Kings in Tampa. On second thought, flipping burgers doesn't sound so bad.
Marketing major = not very exit opps.
Major in finance, economics, or related and make the move if you want.
I agree with the others. Finance, accounting or dare I say law school... BTW all of those bullshit classes you think your taking are laying down the foundation for what you will carry with you for the rest of your life. If I could do it all over again I would have went to law school and then MBA. After that with a little experience under your belt and a hustler's ambition the world is yours.
Bullshit about marketing not having exit opps/being a terrible career choice. Most people here have no idea what a good marketing job is. Product Management pays very well out of school and the experience is highly valued among many companies. In fact, if you go look up top level execs or even look at VC/MBB people, you'll quickly find that MANY people have product management experience. Additionally, many companies won't even consider undergrads for product management roles and only hire out of MBA programs. I have multiple friends doing product management at top F500 companies and started at packages over 80k+ right out of undergrad. Keep in mind most of the people here are so finance-driven they don't realize you can be very successful in other careers.
Google is basically a marketing firm, with a search engine to provide millions of targeted audiences for their advertisers. The people with STEM degrees who can help optimize revenue by segmenting the audience are probably in higher demand than a traditional marketing major. The quants have started taking over marketing as well. It's not like Mad Men, anymore than Wall Street is models & bottles.
For you to call Google a marketing firm shows that you have no understanding between the difference in product marketing, product management, and advertising. Google is an ADVERTISING company that employs many many many times more ad sales guys than marketers. STEM degrees do not teach you the soft skills you need for product management. I don't disagree with the fact that STEM degrees are very helpful for learning the hard skills that are required, but they do little for teaching you the soft skills that you will need.
Hah, when I was an undergraduate I thought marketing was about qualitative and creative stuff too. But it isn't. Advertising is only a small fragment of marketing. And the most quantitative shit I have seen in the business world was the statistical methods used in optimizing marketing spend and advertising budget.
You, my friend, sound like you want to be in PR. Or a more senior ad-industry creative. If you put in enough years slogging away at non-creative stuff in those roles, you'll be allowed to do something creative by the time you're thirty. If you can't handle the numbers side of business, you're not going to make it anywhere else. On the marketing side, all roads lead to product manager... and you will want to be extremely comfortable with statistical methods in order to do well there.
That said, accounting is the least quantitative of the business disciplines. All you need there is elementary school math. corporate finance is high school math, aka time value of money, pre-calc, etc. Marketing, trading, and Asset Management are college and grad school math, aka statistics and so forth. So if I were you, assuming you can add, subtract, multiply, and divide, I'd go for accounting and take it to a corporate finance route.
As for your creative urge, either switch to art school or do what the rest of us do and work on a novel or whatever in the free time you have left over from making all that bank and spending it.
Trading does not require graduate level math. I have been in the business for almost a decade, have distinctly below graduate level stats experience, and it has never hurt me. In fact, I dont think anyone at our firm who is in line to be a trader/PM in the conceivable future has a big-time math background. If I want some analysis done that requires graduate level math we have quant analysts who do that...but they arent traders nor will they ever be because they have spent the last decade learning how to be quantitative analysts while I spent it learning the mechanics of markets and how to trade/manage risk....and my experience is rarer and more valuable. If I start talking about markets with them at the level you need to be a good trader I see the eyes glaze over. I am not knocking graduate level quants, but at least in the macro World that skill-set is not required to run money....to be honest i consider macro trading to be more of an artistic/creative job and the best i have seen at it do not tend to be the type of linear thinkers who are drawn to high-level math programs.
Depends on what products you trade. If you're talking about treasuries and equities, you're absolutely right. However, once you get to derivatives, you absolutely need a higher understanding of mathematics. Check out the exotics desk at your shop and I guarantee you'll see some math geeks.
The marketing major is the trendiest offered currently on American campuses. It's also the biggest joke.
In general hard skill courses (engineering, finance) help much more than soft (communications, marketing)
For e.g. someone with an engineering degree or finance / quant but has great communication / presentation skills has a big advantage. Besides, with good training, it's not incredibly hard to gain some of those presentation skills and more structured approach to marketing. But you can't graduate with marketing and hope to become someone proficient in finance with some "training", just sayin'.
You are going to need some programming or graphic design skills to get into the ad world, especially if you wanna be a UX designer or something similar. Stuff like PHP, javascript and HTML will help you immensely break into this business. Don't waste your time doing something that you don't want to do just because it's 'safer,' you will regret that decision and ultimately go back to do what you are passionate about but this time you'll be 5 years older, already in debt and likely have way more responsibilities.
i'm not a marketing major, but have had no problems getting intervews/offers for marketing jobs/internships
but I did have 1 previous marketing internship
There is a lot of good advice here, but some is a little off base. As bankerella pointed out there is a huge difference betweem marketing and pr or advertising. Marketing isn't generally all that creative. When done well (not always the case) it is much more analytical, for example - determining which business publication gives me the best ROI for my $.
The only College majors I would consider at this point at engineering, sciences, accounting, finance, pre-law or CS. The rest, with some exceptions, are usually not worth it unless you want to teach.
Also, Ron Paul was harsh, but not too far from the truth. Crappy accounting majors end up working shitty jobs at retail banks, small offices, small companies, etc... Crappy marketing majors end up selling cell phones at the mall.
You can get decent Marketing jobs out of undergrad, but it's very difficult and not very structured. The other majors I listed are much more structured. For example, I am an accounting major working in corporate finance at a F500. 2 years ago I was offered a decent promotion into our marketing group. I turned it down, but since we don't even hire undergrad marketers I don't even know how else you'd get those roles 5 years out of school.
Brutalguide is right and wrong. Product Management is a great career, but how do you get that role? Certainly not only by being a marketing undergrad. From what I see it's usually some other technical or analytical roles first.
Also, most of these awesome marketing roles require MBAs. Doing something else as an undergrad and then getting a marketing MBA is a great career path. I think this is more likely to get you where Brutalguide was talking about. I actually might do this myself.
I work in marketing. I sit in front of SAS all day and build models.
Agreed. My job is sort of a hybrid of finance/marketing, but all of the 'marketing' work I do involves analyzing ROI of ad campaigns and doing statistical testing, sort of what bankerella was saying. Don't get me wrong, I like what I do and its interesting work, pays pretty well, but its not like an episode of Mad Men. I was a Finance/Econ undergrad, don't think I would have even gotten past the resume screen for this if I had been a Marketing undergrad. Having had to do it on the fly, I think it's a lot easier to learn the concepts of 'marketing' (in the way that OP referred to it) on your own than it is the statisical/mathematical foundation of the other disciplines. I'd recommend going something more quant because of this, or at least doing a double of like Finance/Accounting/Econ and Marketing.
tl;dr: A finance/econ/accounting major can get a marketing job much more easily than the vice versa.
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