<p>I am currently an undergraduate student at the University of Minnesota - Twin Cities. I am interested in pursuing a finance or management information systems degree. </p>
<p>An occupation as an analyst or consultant seems interesting to me at the moment. I am curious, though, if one degree has a significantly more demand than the other. </p>
<p>I would assume MIS has better prospects, but I do not know if that is true. My gut feeling is that the market is over-saturated with finance majors, so average pay will be lower.</p>
<p>If you are skilled in Finance and enjoy crunching numbers, there are plenty of good job prospects for that with great pay. On the other hand, I have been told that MIS is not that good of a major because it is a hybrid major between management and information systems and many companies would rather have a specialization in one or the other. Rather than a little knowledge of both. Just what I have been told though not sure if thats completely true or not.</p>
<p>Another thing to worry about being an MIS major is that IF an employer rather have someone with a specialized skill, they would get the Computer Science major (if they can) over the MIS major.</p>
<p>In the tech world, the thought process is (and maybe unfair) that a CS major can do a MIS major’s job but a MIS major cannot do a CS major’s job.</p>
<p>Howdy. Not so sure about that last comment. If the narrow topic is pure programming then I may be inclined to agree with you. However in general, MIS roles and CS roles overlap but each have some unique characteristics. Because an MIS student learns about how businesses function, they are ideal for “Business Analyst” or “Systems Analyst” roles. In these job functions, analysts work with the business users to gather their requirements (“what does the new system need to do?”) and then document and translate those business requirements into technical requirements. The latter technical requirements may then be handed over to programmers and software developers (more of the Comp. Sci. roles) to implement the system.</p>
<p>To use a construction metaphor, a designer can make a conceptual model of what a building might look like, but it takes an architect to translate that vision into blueprints that an engineer can work with to build the building. In this metaphor, the Systems Analyst (SA) is like an architect. They understand the design and business ends of things and understand the technical capabilities, etc. so they are in a great position to work with both parties. </p>
<p>I have worked in that environment quite a few times. What ends up happening is that the company does not want to pay BOTH the analyst and the developer. The company is like “why can’t the developer take the requirements?”. This is now much more possible because more and more CS grads are being exposed to software engineering concepts during their college years.</p>
<p>Throw in a methodology like Agile Development and you will have less need for “just analysts”.</p>
<p>My father works in the industry, and I’ve interned there and I agree with Global Traveler. Their is an increase in demand for CS majors to be able to do both. At a minimum they are asked to be able to understand how their work translates into the business end. As he explained it to me, why would you want to pay a guy 80+ dollars an hour to tell another guy who gets paid 80+ dollars an hour how to do his job, when you can just get the first guy to tell people overseas how to do it for just 20 bucks an hour. While an MIS major will definitely start off higher over time a CS major can have more stability, and be preferable to an MIS major as they gain working knowledge of a system.</p>
<p>(My experience comes with dealing with SAP,a program that has distinct business end and programmer end roles.)</p>
<p>I work for a big corporation and we gave business analysts and developers. They do work closely on things. I actually took a business analyst class with oracle last year and the forth and fifth day of class focused on development within the systems. We developed all kings of things to help us better translate things for the regular developers and what not. I thought it was really interesting.</p>
<p>That one week class pretty much integrated things I learned in programming class, business analyst class, and database management class during college. I found it very interesting.</p>
<p>Something else to keep in mind, it is very difficult to become a consultant. Unless you have contacts or go to a school from which a consulting firm actively recruits, your chances of getting an interview are slim. (That is assuming you are very competitive otherwise)
If consulting/analyst jobs are your main interest in the field of finance you might be more engaged with a MIS major (or double major as RockmanEXE said)</p>