What is the most common career for a finance (BA) major?

[platinumike]

Lets say one graduates with a BA in finance. From a state university with a credible business school(Exclude NYU) what career do they usually end up taking? and of course my second question...What is the avg salary of that career?

 

[MoPHo]

i would say maybe working for a large company...something along the lines of a credit card firm or advertising agency? starting out i think you'd have to be put in a department with a group of people so the firm would have to be pretty decent sized...

as for salary? no idea...

 

[aswedc]

If it's a top state school you still have a chance at investment banks, if that's your thing. Can be close to six figures. If it's just any regular school I'd go accounting instead. Almost all career centers keep statistics for average starting salary by major. Call them up.

 

[aswedc]

Oh, by the way, NYU is private.

 

[Whisper]

Most of the people I know who graduated with finance degrees are now in financial analysis. I know one investment banker as well, but not quite sure what she majored in.

 

[Mustangrrl]

One of my friends has a BA in finance, he works for Medicaid, in the accounting department. It's government, so he makes good money and has a great retirement (both through his work and private retirement accounts), and he has good medical/dental insurance.

 

[chickadee]

An investment company like Morgan Stanley?

How much you make is based off of how hard you work.

 

[Hyudra]

Originally posted by: chickadee
An investment company like Morgan Stanley?

How much you make is based off of how hard you work.

I agree... all about how hard you work. Finance is pretty boring, but it pays good and there are jobs. Expect to start in the backend if coming out of a regular university doing support or customer service.

You can go two ways with finance. 1) Business analyst 2) Financial analyst.

I'm on the BA route, but I'd like to get my foot into the FA stuff.

 

[platinumike]

Originally posted by: Hyudra

Originally posted by: chickadee
An investment company like Morgan Stanley?

How much you make is based off of how hard you work.

I agree... all about how hard you work. Finance is pretty boring, but it pays good and there are jobs. Expect to start in the backend if coming out of a regular university doing support or customer service.

You can go two ways with finance. 1) Business analyst 2) Financial analyst.

I'm on the BA route, but I'd like to get my foot into the FA stuff.

whats the difference between financial analysis and business analysis? Im guessin that business analysis has less to do with the accounting and balance sheet info and more of something else...?

 

[mrkun]

A much better place to look for this sort of information: http://forums.businessweek.com/n/pfx/forum.aspx?nav=messages&webtag=bw-bschools

 

[imported_KuJaX]

In my opinion, everyone and their dog has a degree in Finance. It is an extremely over saturated major and thus you are going to be grouped into that saturation and get paid less. If you got a degree in Finance and want to go into finance, you better love repetitive tasks and things that if you taught a child to do, they could do it just fine day after day after day until the day you die. You need to stand out somehow and hopefully once you get nearer to graduation you will look at your skills and decide where to go with them. Just because you have a degree in Finance doesn't mean you have to go into finance.

 

[Hyudra]

BA is improving systems and stuff, like creating new programs to allow new business to come in. FA is the actual finance... forecasting, ect.

As KuJaX says, you better like doing a lot of repetitive things. There's a lot of people with finance degrees, but also there are a lot of jobs for finance. It pays pretty good too.

Boring career, but it'll make you decent money, which you could use to build something of your own thats more rewarding than the everyday repetitive things.

 

[Strk]

Don't you end up working something like 80+ hours a week at those types of jobs?

 

[mrkun]

Originally posted by: Strk
Don't you end up working something like 80+ hours a week at those types of jobs?

That's only investment banking in NYC.