Foreign Language

College Majors Business Major
1

<p>I currently am majoring in accounting and plan to pursue an MSF in Finance in my 4th year and an MBA down the line as I look to work in finance, most likely investment banking. I already have a solid foundation for speaking Russian and have been thinking about taking formal Russian language classes at UF. With Russia exploding from commodity money filtering into their economy I think it might be a good idea to pursue learning the language in more depth as it is a critical language much like Chinese but gets less attention. I could pursue a minor which requires 30 credits; even if I didn't minor in Russian I would still need 10 credits outside of business to get my accounting degree so I am really only taking an additional 20 credits..</p>

<p>Do you think knowing Russian would be a significant asset working in the finance industry? Is it worth my time/effort?</p>

2

<p>Everybody can see that International Business is exploding whether it is in China, Russia, India, Brazil, Mexico, Malaysia, Australia or Indonesia. Studying a foreign language certainly can't hurt--and will probably help, especially if it's in a language not generally learned by a large group of people and is in one of the major growth countries/regions. </p>

<p>The US is unlikely to keep it's top spot in annual GNP for long (China will probably pass them within the next 5 to 10 years). But China's growth rate is also slowing for the first time in the past 15 years. The question is what other countries will have double-digit growth--and therefore be the large investment areas during the next few decades--and Russia, India, Brazil, and maybe Malaysia seem to me to be the top prospects. Therefore taking Russian would seem to be a very good idea in my view.</p>