Yet another career/major thread

[LordFortius]

I am headed off to Stanford this fall and need to figure out what I want to study. I am almost certainly going to be studying EE. However, I don't want to be an engineer forever, and ultimately I would like to do something more business related. So, when the time comes, I plan on going the MBA route.

In the mean time, I am wondering if I should go ahead and double major in something related to business. The program I have in mind gives a BS in Management Science and Engineering, and I would probably specialize in Financial Engineering. What sort of careers would you expect someone with training in EE and Financial Engineering to go into, and what sort of pay? Will it be difficult for me to get a job?

Alternatively, I could forget the double major and just choose either engineering or business/finance...

 

[CanOWorms]

Lots of engineers go into the finance industry without doing any sort of financial engineering or finance stuff (i have no clue what financial engineering is). You'll probably have a pretty big edge over lots of others since some of the more fancy companies only hire from top universities like Stanford.

You don't have to be an engineer if you have an engineering degree - you can do almost anything else except for things like med school (unless you take the necessary courses).

 

[cchen]

You still have plenty of time to figure out what you want to major in. I changed my major 3 times before I finally decided on it. That being said, Management Science is a good field since you can pursue many, many different career opportunities. However, I feel that specializing in financial engineering is quite useless, as you won't learn anything that advanced unless you enter a graduate program.

Try to read up a bit more about financial engineering. FE is not "business," but rather taking engineering methodologies and applying them to the field of finance. Specifically, you use a lot of advanced statistics to analyze data and try to price financial instruments with high volatility. Stock and option pricing usually is a big focus area in FE programs. To really learn this material you'd have to dedicate yourself to it, i.e. a grad program.