<p>I am having accounting as my major and business adm as my minor. But I am interested in learning about finance too. I am confused whether I should major in finance too or not. Can it be useful while getting a job later?</p>
<p>Hi Jasl,</p>
<p>I’m a senior at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) double majoring Finance and Business Administration. I can empathize with your question because I used to be an aspiring Accounting major before I realized that the path wasn’t right for me. I spent a ton of time (way too much, in hindsight) trying to decide upon what major or set of majors and minors I should choose.
To answer your question, whether you should do just accounting or accounting and finance depends greatly on what you want to, but more importantly, how sure you are that you want to stick to a certain path. Many people at UIUC do a double major in accounting and finance since it arguably offers the most flexibility of any choice set of majors in the College of Business. On the other hand, at least at UIUC, you start to realize at junior year of college that your major actually doesn’t make that big of a difference unless you are going for a very specific path. That second major might mean an extra 1 or 2 semesters or at least additional time spent in the classroom that could’ve been spent networking for jobs.
From an employer’s perspective (judging from the couple dozen companies I’ve interviewed with and what I’ve heard from friends), the second major can either be a help or a hindrance. You can either play off one accounting degree by saying that you are a very focused individual or you can play off an accounting and finance double major by saying that you are a hard worker willing to go that extra mile. You can obviously see how both paths can be looked at quite subjectively. At the end of the day, companies here seem to just be looking for someone who will fit the culture and who can be trained to do the job, which no degree will prepare you for fully anyway.
Hopefully this helps – let me know if you have any other questions. Happy to chat.</p>