International Business

College Majors Business Major
1

<p>I'm currently a sophomore at UT - Austin, thinking about transferring to McCombs Business School for Fall 2007. I've been considering both finance and international business, but I'm leaning more towards IB. A few questions:</p>

<p>1) Is Finance as math-heavy as people make it out to be? I'm comfortable to a certain extent with math, and looking at the degree plan, it only has a handful of required math courses. Do the actual classes, such as "Finance 302", etc. rely *that*heavily on math?</p>

<p>2) If I did IB, I'm positive that I'd want to focus on Turkey (half of my family is from there, very familiar with the language, etc.). How much say does one have in determining where they'll want to work after graduating with an IB degree?</p>

<p>3) I know that the salary for IB has much more variation in salaries after you graduate, but is there some sort of comparison as to how much they earn compared to something like finance?</p>

<p>4) What's the typical route after you graduate from IB? What are the most prestigious firms?</p>

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<p>Ah, a couple more. Sorry about that.</p>

<p>5) Will employers care about the fact that I'd be graduating from a fairly reputable business school like McCombs if it was in something like IB? I'm sure it's well regarded in accounting/finance, but does the reputation still stick with something like IB?</p>

<p>6) And finally, how hard is it to get a job in IB after you graduate compared to finance?</p>

3

<p>I think that the central issue with majoring in international business is that it's pretty broad.</p>

<p>the fact of the matter is that there's no real entry level positions called 'international business specialist' or anything like that, international business as a whole involves doing the same jobs as everyone else, accounting, finance, marketing, w/e but in a different country.</p>

<p>What does this mean for you?</p>

<p>It means that you should try to look at current US business careers and see what you like from those, and then try to look at the region you're interested and see if that sector is expanding over there.</p>

<p>Prestigious companies in international business would really just be the top companies in the world that hold offices in a number of countries, so maybe a starting point would be to find out if any of the big companies that are in interesting industries have offices in Turkey.</p>

<p>Will you immediately start out working abroad? Probably not, generally new hires are made to spend some time (maybe a year) within the United States just to prove their worth before being sent abroad.</p>

<p>IB's going to be a very broad path so its hard to give specific career information. </p>

<p><a href="http://www.maersk.com/en%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.maersk.com/en&lt;/a> Maersk Sealand for example is an international shipping company with 325 offices in the world, since it's the shipping business it's pretty unique compared to just working as an accountant or analyst for some company. The problem with Maersk though is they only have like 3 openings for their training program compared to the 2000 applicants who apply.</p>

<p>So maybe you could look at other businesses of the same nature, I know with Maersk's program you have to spend your first 2 years in America and then you're given the option to relocate anywhere in the world with their 325 offices.</p>

<p>If you end up majoring in IB you should probably minor in something else that's also biz related, like finance. The math isn't too intense depending on the courses you take, as a whole it should mostly be plugging into formulas. I'd do the minor just to add some more concrete courses in there, some schools actually don't even allow IB as a single major, you usually have to take it with something else (an example of this is with NYU Stern)</p>