hey everyone i am from canada and wants to pursue my bachelors in finance at harvard.I am really new to the education system and have been having really hard time getting information on the website. so my question is does harvard offer bachelors degree in finance or anything related to finance? i looked at harvard business school the they do offer masters but i couldn"t find anything related to bachelors in finance .if anybody knows how can i get more information or do i need to visit at campus with any advisor please do reply.Any help would be really appreciated Thank you
re business, pre law, pre med, journalism…from the website: While you can take courses related to these fields, Harvard’s academic programs are not pre-professional, in that they do not provide vocational training. Many Harvard graduates plan to continue their education in professional or graduate schools, often in these fields. Please note that both medicine and law are postgraduate programs in the United States. If you are not a U.S. citizen but wish to continue your education in a professional program, particularly in an American medical school, we advise you to consult specific graduate and professional programs in advance to understand those schools’ admissions and financial aid policies concerning international students.
@IN4655 @HRSMom that helped alot . so what would you guys recommend me to do to do my bachelor at any uni. and than do my masters at harvard.
An MBA comes after you get a bachelors and then work for a few years. So if you can do that, then yes.
@singh08 Of all the ivies only Penn and Cornell offer degrees in finance since only these two have ugrad business schools. However you do not need a finance degree to break into business and you can also do that with an Econ degree from an Ivy.
People go into finance jobs with a variety of degrees, such as English, History, Political Science, Mathematics, Engineering, and Physics.
My point is that a finance degree isn’t needed to go into investment banking, hedge funds, or other finance jobs. The companies that recruit for those jobs are looking for smart students who did well at top colleges, and the companies will teach them whatever they need to know about finance.
Agree 100% with Sherpa. Don’t fixate on the title of any major/concentration. Employers want a solid foundation of academic excellence in relevant fields. A lack of a “finance” degree doesn’t preclude this whatsoever since most employers train their employees for their specific needs. They want people whom they can train and can handle the work/social requirements.
Another poster on another forum was searching for colleges with “Government” majors. I replied that no employer would care if his major was Government or PoliSci or Economics or History or English Lit or Music Performance – as long as he showed academic ability in the related field.
All of the above is true. But if you look closely I think you will see that Harvard has quite a number of students whose concentration is Applied Mathematics or Statistics, either of which would support a focus on finance within the concentration. There is even a program called Applied Mathematics with Specialization in Economics. With judicious use of electives both within and outside of these concentrations, one can emerge from Harvard College with as strong or stronger an academic background in finance as Wharton’s undergraduate program offers. They just don’t call it “Finance.”
I also agree completely that employers in the world of finance don’t necessarily care if the students they hire are finance majors, especially students from Harvard. But I think they do care if you have sophisticated math skills. If you are an English or Music concentrator, and you want to work in finance, it would be a good idea to have some of those Applied Math or Statistics courses on your transcript. With good grades.
@JHS makes a good point about the necessity of having quantitative skills. A financial services employer interviewing a math or physics major presumes that the kid has the analytical horsepower to handle the work; the English major has to prove it.
During my time at a bulge bracket investment banking firm, when we were hiring analysts out of college, a person with a finance degree (even from Wharton) did not automatically rise to the top of the pile. Personally (and a lot of my colleagues felt similarly), I was more intrigued by hard STEM majors with strong quantitative backgrounds, such as engineering, physics and CS. Candidates that did well in those subjects demonstrated an ability to solve complex problems and the ability to connect the dots between both quantitative and qualitative data. The only remaining question about those candidates was their communication skills, written and oral. For finance majors, I always checked to see if they had broader interests and skills beyond finance/accounting. We were going to put all the hired analysts through a very rigorous training program in which we taught them the way our firm approached financial analysis. For purposes of their jobs, non-finance majors were as well qualified in financial theory and analysis as finance majors after the training. I agree with @JHS and @sherpa that if you are a humanities or social science major, you need to show quantitative credentials, although you do check the communication box.
With the exception of Wharton/Penn there aren’t any undergrad business programs in the Ivy’s
I did not know about Cornell, but in general I agree with several posters that developing hard quant skills is more important to getting a job in finance. Go somewhere and get an MBA after 4-6 years relevant experience, but look past Harvard there are much better business schools out there
@caesarcreek thanxx alot for the comment