<p>@blizzard
It’s no problem, I’m glad to be able to help at all. Good luck with your application, hopefully it all works out for you. I’ll give your questions a shot.</p>
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<li>I study my ass off and don’t even get good results, haha. I’m majoring in it simply because I want to, I consider it my primary interest and I want to take advantage of a top-two finance program. Besides, for recruiting, it’s basically impossible to come out of Stern and want to go into finance without majoring/minoring in it. Now that there’s only concentrations, you’d have to go with that.</li>
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<p>I plan to continue in finance. I’ve already secured some exceptionally competitive offers and I chose one for this summer. We’ll see how it plays out, but I’m very very happy with where I am so far. </p>
<p>As for how it affects your job, in finance there are such a variety of positions (even with the same division) that require different kinds or levels of quantitative ability. In S&T, traders as a whole are required by the nature of their job to be better with quant than sales guys, but traders of certain products will require FAR more math than other traders (i.e. equities derivatives have incredibly complicated calculations behind them). Some salespeople are incredibly smart with numbers and macro trends though. Point is, there’s no hard and fast rule. “Quants” are the guys who create all those formulas and calculations, who code some of the programs for trading, do all the fun **** like stochastic calculus to analyze risk, all the stuff that scares everyone else in finance.</p>
<p>Even in IBD, the level of quant you need is far less than everyone believes. 80% (and that’s a conservative figure) of what you learn in your four years at school is irrelevant to your job, even if you’re at a top-5 business program. Your first 2 months as an analyst will be an extended training program where they sit you down, teach you every bit of finance, accounting, and what little econ you’ll need to know to do your job well, and that’s it. 4 years of school boils down to 2 months, which is why unless you’re going into a quant role, the subject in the degree you earn isn’t as relevant as the name of your school, because your school tells them how smart/hard you worked in high school to get into college, and your GPA tells them how hard you worked at that hard/amazing school.</p>
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<li><p>Cohorts are amazing for freshman year, because you’ll get to know everyone as you’re all going through that awkward adjusting-to-a-completely-different-life phase. After that, it typically isn’t that powerful a connection; it’s a useful network, if you’re in a class without any of your friends and you see someone from your cohort you might be able to get help with the homework or borrow a book if you need it. As I see it, it’s something set up to provide some kind of immediate framework for freshmen so they have something to identify with at Stern. After that, it’s what you make of it. Some of your close friends may happen to be in your cohort, most probably won’t. At least when you graduate you’ll have a sizable network right away by default.</p></li>
<li><p>Nope, not at all. Matter of fact, it’s most common. More kids go abroad sophomore spring than any other semester, followed by junior fall. It’s easier that way for most people’s curriculum, you’re pretty much finished with the MAP requirements by then, you’ve started the Stern core, but you haven’t hit the upper-level electives and major classes. It works out that way, if it’s the spring semester and you’re abroad, 80%+ of the kids are sophomores, if it’s the fall, 80%+ are juniors. I’m a sophomore and I’m abroad right now, matter of fact.</p></li>
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<p>@david
Finance and accounting are very different fields. Finance includes things like investment banking, sales and trading, hedge, private equity, venture capital, and some others. In general, the pay is higher, the work is considered more “prestigious” (take that as you will, prestige is a huge factor for some people and not at all for others), and there are exit opportunities based on all that. Accounting, there are still a number of career options, but there’s typically public accounting (CPA), internal work (audit, payroll, blah blah blah), and consultancy (the Big 4: PwC, Deloitte, E&Y, and Arthur Andersen).</p>
<p>Lucrative is subjective. Different people want to do different things. Personally, you’d have a hard time paying me enough to be an accountant, whereas there’s some people who hate high finance and wouldn’t work even in a back office role if you paid them fat stacks. I can’t talk much about internships in accounting because I haven’t pursued it at all, only finance. I got offered an internship by a large tax accountancy firm in the city but it was in early December and I knew I was leaving for Europe and didn’t accept. I guess the best way I could answer this question is to say that the lucrative positions in either field (bulge bracket banking for finance vs. partner-track consulting in the Big 4) will have exceptionally competitive recruiting, neither’s easy to break into. I can’t give you concrete figures as to which one has more opportunity for hiring.</p>
<p>Hope this helps, also sorry for the delayed response.</p>
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