Best Undergraduate/Graduate Degree to Break Into Consulting/Finance/I-Banking

Colleges and Universities A-Z Princeton University
1

<p>Hey guys,</p>

<p>I'm at U Penn (will be studying there next year) and I've been considering Economics as my prospective major for a long time.</p>

<p>Of late, though, I've heard many say that cracking a great job in finance/consulting/I-Banking requires top level QUANTITATIVE skills, which are not generally found in Economics undergraduate majors. Do these jobs really require a huge amount of advanced math for modeling, etc?</p>

<p>Should I major in Economics, or Engineering, or Computer Science? Also thinking about applied mathematics, but I'm not sure. I want to equip myself with the skills that employers (firms such as Goldman, McKinsey, Bain, boutique firms, etc) will find attractive, and I want to get my foot in the door.</p>

<p>I do plan to get my MBA later (hopefully from a very solid grad B-school).</p>

<p>What's the route I should take (generally speaking)?</p>

2

<p>So I’m not entirely sure why you’re posting this to the Princeton forum (since you’ve decided to go to Penn), but as a former management consultant, those three fields are very very different in terms of what they actually require on a day-to-day basis.</p>

<p>That said, almost none of them are rocket science (I don’t think that you understand the drudgery of being a first year analyst at Goldman–there’s no real analytical horsepower required, just the ability to crank stuff out at all hours of the day and night) and you can do well at any of them from any of those disciplines (including Econ, which can be math-heavy if you’d like it to be). How about majoring in something that you actually enjoy? You’ll do better at it–high GPAs lead to good offers.</p>