<p>Hello Columbia Community!</p>
<p>I'm planning on majoring in Economics-math at Columbia, and was wondering if any current Columbia students or others (cough Admissionsgeek:)!) would be willing to give advice on it.</p>
<p>My strongest suit is math, which is why I feel I could do well in this subject. However, I never took a business/economics type of class in school, so I guess I'm fairly clueless. I know there is alot of supply/demand talk, etc. but I am not sure how it works overall.</p>
<p>Is economics tough at Columbia and what kind of stuff can I expect?</p>
<p>is it a good major with a lot of job opportunities?</p>
<p>thanks!</p>
<p>I’m in Seas, but I’ve taken a ton of econ, and know quite a bit about classes,professors, curriculum etc. From the looks of it, you are an appropriate fit. A lot of kids who have taken econ in high school and did well, don’t do nearly as well at Columbia because econ is more mathematical in college. Every econ class apart of principles usually involves some calculus, linear algebra or statistical regression. So I’d say good math is much more of prerequisite to do well here. For most econ-political science majors econ courses are difficult for them. For most seas students and econ-math majors, the econ courses are a bliss. Some days I wish I was an Econ major in the college, because I’ve loved my econ courses, and they’ve been the ones I haven’t had to break my back over. Talk to a different set of people and you’ll get a opposite answers.</p>
<p>In terms of rigor, the econ major is solid but not ridiculous, you do develop good analytical skills. There are some tougher classes (like advanced micro-economics) and easier classes like financial economics. Financial and consulting firms like econ majors, as well as engineering majors. Investment banking divisions, trading desks, asset management divisions and consulting firms hire tons of econ majors. As an econ-math major you are set for any job on wall street (or in economic consulting and government/NGO economic divisions). As a plain econ major, you will be barred from a few quantitative roles, but 80-85% of the jobs on the campus career center will be open to you. You can ask more questions on here, or PM me if you want individual info.</p>
<p>I don’t know if it’s a function of the people who are actually in the major or a function of the department but grade inflation in econ is ridiculous. Could be everyone that is in there is really smart (I doubt it) or that the department likes to put graduates on wall street (which requires a high gpa). I can’t actually comment as to the difficulty of the curriculum tho.</p>
<p>^In my experience exactly the opposite is true. I’ve found econ classes (compared to core and other Columbia College classes) are graded more harshly and strictly. Most large econ courses are curved to a straigh B, meaning as many people get Cs as As. Some smaller electives are curved to a B,B+ so we’re looking at an average gpa in the class of 3.0-3.2, this is less than the college average. Many econ majors in the college might do well in their other classes which raises their gpa, but I’ve seen grade distributions for classes, and I’ve been in classes where I’ve consistently beaten the mean by close to one standard deviation and still only managed an A-.</p>
<p>perception is always going to be king here. so concoll and skraylor can of course disagree even if they were in the same class.</p>
<p>my opinion of econ at columbia - it is very good, very highly sought after, but probably gears you closer toward wall street than toward further graduate study. not a fault of columbia, but it is easier to be high minded when you don’t live down the street from the financial capital of the world.</p>
<p>most of the material you will learn will be new for most folks. so don’t worry if you have no exposure. but probably the most important thing for being econ is how good you are at math. the better you are and the better you are able to apply concepts, the easier it will be.</p>
<p>in terms of a good major to get a jobs - well think about college as a time to develop skill sets. econ and any financial literacy training you can have will open up doors in the wall-street/consulting world. but there are a host of other things you can do that will help you in getting a job. your language training, maybe exposure to other sciences, your communication skills. they all become relevant. so econ is good because it is pretty clear to see the connection between a high paying job on wall street and the major, but also think about the fact that you need more than just econ (like you need more than just SAT scores) to stand out in the job market.</p>
<p>i didn’t find the 2 econ classes i took to be very hard, or curved hard, but they were intro. also there are a number of econ joint majors worth thinking about (with math, stats, polisci, philosophy) and some students also do economic history that gives you other skills and maybe more interesting classes.</p>
<p>adv micro, macro, metrics do an amazing job of preparing for graduate school. imo most other econ classes are a waste of time…</p>
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<p>no, this isn’t a perception thing, perhaps we might disagree if we are in different classes, but most profs tell you what the median and stdev are for a class. And I’ve been in classes where they take the midterm and say this was the mean, this was the stdev, these are the grade ranges A, A-, B+, B, B-… So you can very easily and precisely calculate how high or low the class is curved and how tightly it is curved. Perhaps Skraylor has taken different econ courses than I have, but the econ core courses and electives that I’ve taken have all curved to between a B and a B+.</p>
<p>Finally in terms or job placement/grad school. many kids go to wall street because they are paid the most there. If someone isn’t passionate about finance and not that materialistic there are tons of opportunities to do research under top notch professors and get into top grad schools. I actually know several kids who want to go to econ grad school, they are smart as hell, well supported and don’t run out of challenging econ, math and stat courses.</p>
<p>Thanks for the responses guys, they were all extremely helpful 
Looking forward to majoring in econ by your guys’ responses! Hopefully grading will be okay and I can sneak out with a B+ or higher haha.</p>
<p>So the consensus is that econ is not good if I’m planning on going to grad school? I always planned to go to grad-school, but with 1 or 2 years break in between. Hoping to get a good job at wall-street in between by the sounds of everything. Columbia (as well as most ivies) is ranked high for econ so hopefully it’s everythign it’s hyped up to be!</p>