<p>College has a lot of things to offer, the issue is the subset of those things that depend on your choice of major.</p>
<p>I don’t think the point is necessarily restricted to concern over supporting a family. The typical argument that is run through over and over around here is money vs. passion. The choice presented is between a less-interesting but high-paying job and a more-interesting but low-paying job. I suspect that this argument may really be a strawman. Do art history, musical therapy, etc. graduates really take low-paying jobs in their fields, or do they in fact end up doing something just as unrelated as accounting would have been? Does anyone have any statistics to present here?</p>
<p>Good points from both sides here. I think balancing future security needs with fun in the present is the key, but difficult sometimes. I speak from the point of view of a high school dropout who didn’t give a flying **** about the future when I was younger but now regret that way of thinking.</p>
<p>It’s true that you can never know the future, but you should also be proactive about it and set yourself up for success later on. College is only 4 years. After that you’ve got 50-60 more to live and you’ll want those years to be filled with financial security and independence.</p>
<p>All,</p>
<p>My son is a rising HS senior. He just submitted his application to our IS university with accounting as the major. He has a GPA of over 3.8 with SAT of 1950. I have concerns about him pursuing Pharmacy (probably a boring one) program since he did not do well in calculus. He is OK with chemistry (AP score=3) , biology, and math up to Pre-cal . Since he likes social sciences, we decided that he should try business especially accounting. He has decent social skill. However, he is not good at debate. (He will take the debate class in his senior year.) He is someone who rather put his saving in bank than in the stock market. Therefore, I am not sure if he would be comfortable with other areas in business. </p>
<p>I believe that accounting is not easy from what I heard. Getting the numbers right is just the 1st step. The more important aspect is to have an intuition about whether the numbers make sense with all the background of the accounting rules and laws. An accountant has to be able to smell something fishy looking at the balance sheet and be able to pinpoint the potential source of problem in the audit. What does it take to be a successful accountant? What are the clues and hints you are looking for from a high school student who may succeed in accounting?</p>
<p>Thanks for the help.</p>
<p>^best way to know is by doing. I know that’s not the answer you want, but the only way to know for sure is by taking any accounting class and seeing if it interests him/is something he can be good at.</p>
<p>Based on my rather limited experiences thus far, I’d say that to be good at accounting, one has to have a good memory (yes, I know you shouldn’t memorize everything but there are still a lot of rules, definitions and other things that basically need to be memorized), be comfortable around numbers, and have a good work ethic/ability to see the big picture. By being comfortable around numbers I don’t mean being able to do fourier transformations, but at least be good at manipulating numbers or doing quick math and knowing how numbers keep order in various financial statements. Also, because a lot of the work can be monotonous/repetitive, I think a good accountant has to be willing to either see the big picture or beyond the mind-numbingness of the work somehow to see how the information is used/present the information in a manner that can be useful. I think what separates me from a lot of my classmates is that while certain parts of accounting are definitely boring, I always see how this information can be used and think more deeply about what I’m learning as opposed to others that just go through the motions and get frustrated at how much there is to know without applying it or realizing why what they’re doing is important.</p>
<p>my $0.02, hope that helps but ask a more experienced member because I’m still a kid (junior in college, but my advice has gotten me As in my accounting classes thus far).</p>
<p>Listen to creamgethamoney. This is an excellent description. I think you’ll do well in accounting…having the right expectations is a the best way to go into it.</p>
<ul>
<li>former Big 4 CPA</li>
</ul>
<p>creamgethamoney and acaden,</p>
<p>Thanks for the advice. The insight beyond the numbers are the key. I hope that he can gain these abilities through discussing with professors and in the study groups.</p>
<p>“I have concerns about him pursuing Pharmacy (probably a boring one) program since he did not do well in calculus.”</p>
<hr>
<p>Have him brush up on his calculus and tell him to do pharmacy. He will make twice as much money and will never have to worry about losing his job to outsourcing or Turbo Tax.</p>
<p>^^Disgruntled worker. </p>
<p>The only people who complain about accounting job prospects are the pure number crunchers whose jobs can be eliminated.</p>
<p>Disagree strongly. Pharmacies could be automated or more people could move to medicine by mail. If I were in charge of Medicare Part D the first thing I would do is cut out the middleman(pharmacies). Send everyone their pills through the mail. A database tracking what prescriptions you have, maybe even what conditions you have, could do a good job making sure you don’t have any interactions…a better job than a pharmacist. </p>
<p>Your doctor and the pharmaceutical company are the only ones necessary in that kind of industry, everyone else is a cost center that might have a few years of milk and honey as the baby boomers retire but could ultimately be removed from the equation entirely. </p>
<p>My girlfriend has a prescription which she gets through the mail. If everyone that could do that did so(saving themselves and probably whoever their insurance or welfare provider is billions of dollars), there’d be a lot of unemployed pharmacists out there.</p>
<p>Well, go with accounting if you want to. Make sure you get a job before you graduate otherwise I will see you at H & R Block.</p>
<p>Yea Jonah, screw pharmacists! Screw doctors too. I’d rather just type my symptoms into a database and then have the AI tell me what medicine to take. And why not just train robots to administer shots and do surgery? Much more cost effective that way. It’s all those damn lobbyists fault but for some reason only me, Jonah, and Glenn Beck seem to notice.</p>
<p>That’s moronic. </p>
<p>If a doctor who has been through 4 years of medical school and completed his residency has prescribed you a particular drug, you do not need some other guy with a really high salary to put the pills in a bottle and give them to you. </p>
<p>[CVS</a> Caremark Launches iPhone Application for Caremark.com](<a href=“http://www.intomobile.com/2010/07/29/cvs-caremark-launches-iphone-application-for-caremark-com/]CVS”>CVS Caremark Launches iPhone Application for Caremark.com)</p>
<p>Seeing as how you can manage your prescriptions from CVS with an iPhone app, I would not assume that being a pharmacist is necessarily going to be the most stable job between now and retirement in 2050 or so.</p>