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>