This situation is pretty simple, I’m just unfamiliar in the world of college majors. I’m applying for colleges now, and I’m trying to decide on a major.
Originally I geared my high school courses towards Chemical Engineering, and although I enjoyed it, I also participated in a lot of business finance classes and found it extremely gratifying. I also really like math and was considering going all the way to a Applied or Pure Mathematics degree.The problem with that is I’d be working with a lot of data, which kinda seems cool to me, but my math teachers seem to be steering me towards engineering instead, and not a straight math degree.
I read somewhere that a mathematics degree can go along with a business career, and this got me thinking about what degree should I get if I really love mathematic and also love personal finance. Is there a degree that involves higher level math in finance? Or would I major in mathematics with a minor in business finance, or some kind of economics?
I’m just curious to how this would play out, because it just might be the road I choose. Thanks in advance for the help!!
You can do quantitative finance which involves a lot more math than just straight finance. The other option requires you get into a top school and major in economics, this will set you up for business and the economics program will involve a lot more mathematics than you would get at mid tier schools.
Your teachers may try to “steer” you in a direction because of their own biases, wishes, and hopes, especially if you are a great student. They mean well and are only trying to help you, but their recommendations are likely to be based on their own assumptions about you and about the job market rather than your actual interests or actual data on jobs.
The bottom line is you don’t really need to know what you want to major in right this second. For engineering, it is helpful to know before going to college because even when you declare it up front it can often take longer than four years, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t simply create a college list with a lot of good engineering programs and decide from there.
You might also be interested in a major like quantitative finance or financial engineering or operations research ([url=<a href=“http://ieor.columbia.edu/bs-operations-researchfinancial-engineering%5DColumbia%5B/url”>http://ieor.columbia.edu/bs-operations-researchfinancial-engineering]Columbia[/url] is the only school I know of that has an undergrad financial engineering major- and now it’s a concentration under their operations research major -
but others might). Industrial engineering is another major that blends business concepts with engineering.
But it could be that you’re just super interested in applied math or straight math, and that’s great too - there are lots of ways you can enter into business with a math major.
Among your options are: actuarial sciences, economics at a strong school, Bioinformatics & Computational Biology, system dynamics, big data. Linear algebra is the basic tool in many science and social science fields For an example, check out https://www.wpi.edu/news/guided-big-data. Math is interdisciplinary in its use and demands, but sometimes labels help.
I hope this site helps answer some questions on Actuarial Mathematics (BS) @ https://www.wpi.edu/academics/study/actuarial-mathematics-bs. This website also discusses how students may complete both a bachelor’s degree in Actuarial Mathematics and a master’s degree in Financial Mathematics OR Applied Statistics within 5 years. There is no discussion at this school about a BS major in statistics, but they offer ten different statistics courses at the undergraduate level as well as the actuarial and mathematics degrees.
Statistics are widely used in an endless range of fields. Consequently, many statistics courses have been developed which teach the application of statistical tools to fields ranging from business/ insurance/economics to physics/engineering /biology. In my experience, related fields will even develop their own vocabulary for applying the same statistical tools to the application of their particular approach. For example: economists, sociologists, and psychologists sometimes have communications problems because the fields develop their own terminology when applying the same set of mathematical tools to analyze the same problem. It is not the math, but the terminology which causes the confusion!
Trained as an economist, I had an actuarial student work for me one summer on some marketing research while just six months earlier a team of engineers and I had been building models with a sociologist on the impact of highways on cities. Quit frankly, it was fun and it was real world! No single course or set of courses by themselves could have prepared me for it. In the end, one learns to dance by actually doing real problems. We used to call that “on the job training.” The operative word today is “project.”
Mathematics, applied mathematics, and/or statistics are good majors (with some supplemental economics and business classes; economics with a lot of math & some business classes; potentially finance with some economics and extra math class.
Thanks everyone again. How about a triple major in Finance, Mathematics, and Business Analytics? Or Finance, Mathematics, and Data Modeling? How bad is a triple major? I have a friend at Rose Hulman who is doing one right now, and he claims it to be challenging but not exhaustive. His majors are Computer Science, Mathematics, and Programing.