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Finance

Banks pick their people in the spring of second year. Wait until third year to think about it and at a lot of them you have already missed it.

Written by the Sidequest team. Reviewed 2026-09-05.

Try the career before you pick the major

The loud end of this degree is one career. Spend five minutes inside it before you spend four years aiming at it.

Northwind · what it is worth

A lowest and a highest number, for Harlan's meeting

  • •Northwind: roasts its own coffee, runs its own cafes
  • •sells about $210 million a year, still growing
  • •nothing on the page yet, just the question

the blank page, before you start

Working out a number is the easy part. Picking the one you can explain to the buyer is the job, and that is what I want from you.

Northwind is for sale. What do you look at to work out a fair price: what it sells, what it keeps after costs, or what other coffee companies sold for?

On what it keeps after costs (bankers call that EBITDA)On what it sells in a year

Try a day as an investment banker

A short, playful taste of the real work.

Try it out
Where it leads

Financial analyst, investment banker, accountant, and the money side of ordinary companies. More finance graduates end up somewhere the degree was genuinely needed than in any other major here.

The week

Fifteen hours in class, 30 on your own, and most of your own hours are problems with one right answer. Calculus and statistics come first and they are required. The finance itself does not properly start until your third year.

What people earn four years after they finish
WEAKEST PROGRAMS$63,730TYPICAL$77,504TOP PROGRAMS$101,609

Where people end up

Most of them do not become investment bankers. They become financial analysts, accountants, and the people inside ordinary companies who decide what the company can afford, which is steadier work and pays well without the hours.

Investment banking is the loud end and it is small, hard to enter, and picked from a handful of schools very early. The best paid tenth of people who sell and trade investments earn $212,880, and the middle of that same group earns $78,660, which tells you how far apart the two ends of it are.

There is a credential in this field almost no seventeen year old has heard of and it is worth knowing about now. Three exams, and four thousand hours of real investment work over at least three years before you can hold it. At every one of the three levels, more candidates fail than pass.

Top ways to become an investment banker.

What a week is like

You take four to six classes at once, which comes out to about 15 credit hours a semester. It is that same load every semester for four years: 120 credits, eight semesters, done.

About 15 of those hours are spent sitting in class. The other 30 are work you do on your own, two hours behind every hour you spend in a room. Call it 45 hours a week.

It is spread across seven days rather than stacked into five, so you can keep your evenings or you can keep your weekends, not usually both. What it does not leave is much slack in the weeks when two big things land on the same day.

A waking week is about 112 hours. This is the share of it the degree takes.

  • In class15 hours
  • Work on your own30 hours
  • Yours67 hours

What those 45 hours are spent on.

  • with other people

    Rooms of a hundred, on how money moves: what a company is worth, what a loan really costs, why a market prices something the way it does.

  • on your ownthe hard part

    Calculus and statistics for the first two years, then the thing the whole degree is for: work out what a company is worth, and show every step of how you got there. There is one right answer and your working carries most of the mark. At some schools a finance major has to reach a higher grade in the same class than the accounting majors sitting beside them.

  • on your own

    Textbook chapters and whatever the financial press published this week. It is less reading than almost any other degree here.

  • on your own

    A spreadsheet that takes a real company's numbers, turns them into what it is worth, and then answers what happens if one of them changes. It is the most portable thing the degree gives you.

  • with other people

    Four of you, one real company, one recommendation, and a presentation at the end where people ask you the hard question you hoped they would miss.

  • Finance and accounting classes0%
  • Maths, statistics and economics29%
  • Everything else you still have to take71%
  • Classes you pick yourself0%

There is no finance in your first year at all. Almost a third of it is calculus, statistics and economics, and not one credit of it is yours to choose.

How much do you make?

Business is not one degree, and this is the expensive end of it. Finance pays $83,343 four years out. Business administration, the general one that three times as many people take, pays $68,257.

  1. Right out of college

    $83,343

    Four years after finishing, the average finance graduate earns $83,343, counting people at work and not back in school.

  2. Midway through

    $112,000

    Between 35 and 45, the average finance graduate earns $112,000.

  3. At the height of it

    $212,880

    The best paid tenth of people who sell and trade investments earn $212,880.

The gap holds. By 35 to 45 the average finance graduate is on $112,000, against $90,000 for a general business degree and $82,000 for business management. Accounting, the closest sibling, reaches $97,000.

The number that matters most here is not about money at all. Seven in ten finance graduates land somewhere the degree was genuinely needed. That is the highest share on this site, and on some majors here it is under half.

The average money still owed on student loans

$21,732

The standard plan clears it in ten years.

Is this you?

If investment banking is the point of this for you, the calendar is the thing nobody mentions. Banks now fill most of their third year internship places with people they met in the spring of second year, so the window opens about eighteen months earlier than an ordinary graduate hunt, and someone who starts looking in third year has missed it at many of the big ones. The degree has its own gate too, and it is quieter: at some schools a finance major needs a higher grade in corporate finance than an accounting major sitting the same class.

Tap any that sound like you.

This is probably you if

Probably not you if

What people who did it say

  • Everson

    College Confidential, August 2018

    "For example, an accounting major could take the class earn a C and be able to get his degree. A Finance major would have to get a B-."

  • Everson, in the same thread

    College Confidential, August 2018

    "I meant weed-out as in culling the herd to keep the value of the degree up, not to learn material relevant for future classes."

  • aatd86

    Hacker News, September 2025

    "I initially wanted to go into CS, but had to start with 2 years of generic fundamentals closer to your regular EE curriculum. Ended up majoring in finance... Go figure, I got lost along the way, smh."

Questions people ask

Is a finance degree worth it?
On money, yes, and it is the clearest case on this site: $83,343 four years out, $112,000 by 35 to 45, and more graduates landing somewhere the degree was genuinely needed than any other major here.
What can you do with a finance degree?
Financial analyst, accountant, and the money side of ordinary companies take most graduates. Investment banking is the small, early-recruited end of it, where the best paid tenth earn $212,880.
Do you need calculus for a finance major?
Yes, and statistics with it. Both are required and both land before the finance core does, so the first year of this degree has no finance in it at all.
How early do the big banks start picking people?
The spring of your second year of college, for a summer place in your third. Banks now give most of those places to people they met that early, so someone who starts looking in third year has already missed it at many of the big banks.
Finance or business administration?
They are two different degrees and the numbers say so. Finance pays $83,343 four years out and business administration pays $68,257, from about a third as many graduates. Marketing sits at $69,303 and accounting at $76,194.

Where these numbers come from

See the other majors