Curious why someone would choose one vs the other, the rationale. Since I’m sure there’s a bunch of BS/MA/MS people around why did you choose Econ instead of Finance or vice-versa.
Some econ programs are run by hippies and are unlikely to land you gainful employment. This was the case at my school, so I chose finance.
I was Business Admin w/ concentrations in Finance and Economics. I started out with just Finance and picked up Econ along the way. I thought the subject matter was interesting.
I chose Economics because I like the discipline - also if you design your program properly, you will have some fairly rigorous creative modeling skills. I would recommend coupling any Econ with a good math background. At least the entire calc series and I would add proofs and fundamentals, linear alg, real analysis, and differential equations. Having a moderate programing background certainly wouldn’t hurt either (C,C++, and maybe perl or Python). The level of statistical and quantitative training you will get in an econ program is normally beyond what you will get in a finance program. Also, the research skills you gain in upper level courses are extremely important in anything you will do.
i agree with undergraduate econ profs and support networks being hippies relative to undergrad business school staff.
Econ at my school was in the Arts & Sciences college instead of Business Admin (I never did think that made sense). I felt like Finance would be better for finding a job, since it was in Business Admin.
Some schools have Econ in the Business admin, some don’t… Guess the business one are for applied econ… the A&S is for Econ more textbook… who knows though.
You can do almost anything with econ. But i always thought regression analysis was fun so econ was for me. I still had to take all of the finance classes.
when I was in first year at my university you basically needed a 4.0 GPA to get in. Unless you had a percentage from HS in the 90’s you couldnt get into the commerce program directly and had to declare yourself pre-commerce. I did that but I was also working full time, partying alot and I had alot of trouble with the calculus classes I had to take and ended up with a bullshit 67% average. Then I decided on getting a liberal arts degree, now that im picking up the essentials of an accounting undergrad Im glad I made that choice because it really taught me how to think critically, look inbetween the lines and see things for what they are. unfortunately it didn’t teach me how spell so alot of times when I post on AF I sound like a fool. but the classes were 80% female and you now your boy seanie took advantage of that. I kind of miss undergrad.
I did both
I was Econ major in undergrad, minor in business. I wish I did the opposite
Anyone do a masters in econ that works in the private sector? Seems like all the econ jobs are govt or professors.
I went with the Finance major, Econ minor. The major/minor distinction might be a bit misleading, though: I only took one more finance class than econ class. I think finance ended up being a lot more interesting. Econ is good if you want to get your doctorate in drawing graphs, but they way they taught it at my college, it’s all theory, no application - and that’s in the business school. My finance classes tossed a pile of 10-k’s at me, and taught me how to read them, while my econ classes told me how everything should happen in an ideal world that works just like the models. In one of my finance classes, we took a sector, and did merger analysis - of the 5 mergers we predicted, 3 have already happened (this is since Spring 2007: not bad considering that M&A activity has been pretty sparse for the last year). I’m glad I have both, and think I would have liked the econ better if my school had different classes - I would have loved econometrics or game theory, but I had a tough time trying to stay awake in a labor economics course.
They only offered Economics I think (long time ago). Wish I had done Finance. 3 years of Pareto optimality, free trade and the like. Semi interesting, but what practical application? Didn’t do any stats and it was just when computers were getting off the ground, so no Excel course either. Assume that is standard now. All essays were hand written. I did rather well with those, so that is a benefit of being from another era…
I have undergraduate degrees in both Finance and Economics. The econ degree has really done nothing for me in my career. I should have done accounting instead of economics. I have been passed over for several jobs because they wanted someone with more experience in accounting or an accounting degree even though i have a strong grasp of accounting.
My school didn’t have a finance degree, so anyone wanting to work in business did econ. I realized after Econ 121 (Intro to Econ) that it was useless and did math instead. They did offer a few accounting and corporate finance classes, so I sneaked in enough of those to make myself relevant. I originally used “snuck” in the sentence above, but Bill Gates tells me it’s not a word. interesting.
I just did Business Admin and took an array of finance classes. We didn’t have too many econ classes - only macro and micro. Edit: ugh - now that I think about it, I actually took an honors class called “The Calculus of Economics” - was not a big fan of it at the time. But we didn’t have an Econ or Finance major , only Business Admin