<p>I recently visited the Princeton website and looked at financial engineering at Princeton. Is this the best major at Princeton to prepare you for I-Banking? Or would economics be a better fit?</p>
<p>I'm a princeton ORFE major currently doing an i-banking internship. You really need close to zero of ORFE information to prepare you for i-banking. Investment banks are generally looking for smart, hard workers who learn fast and who they dont mind being around for 18 hours a day. They'll teach you anything you need to know, so dont waste the opportunity for an amazing education preparing for a job, especially one that even the best i-bankers dont really like at the analyst level.</p>
<p>Now if you LOVE finance, modeling, etc. that's a different story...</p>
<p>I think iv4me pretty much hit the point squarely on the head when he said "Investment banks are generally looking for smart, hard workers who learn fast and who they dont mind being around for 18 hours a day."</p>
<p>Think of your major, as an economist would put it, as a signaling device. You need to show that you are:
1. Sharp
2. Interested in finance
3. Work hard (very hard).
4. Okay with numbers</p>
<p>No major has a monopoly on the first or third characteristic. Majoring in Econ or ORFE will show the second, but frankly, there are a hundred better ways of showing this (internships, reading the WSJ) than giving up your major of choice. As for the last, ORFE may be better than Econ if you've taken Econ classes that aren't math heavy, but again, you need to be able to multiply 18 and 12, not re-prove Fermat's last theorem.</p>
<p>At the end of the day, think about what you'd likely do in investment banking (IBD, at least): stay up late and crunch numbers. The smart Woman's Studies major who's been reading the WSJ and has shown leadership may well trump the ORFE major who can do a few fancy calculations.</p>