Advice for Finance major

blossom
Wed, 25 Mar 2026 13:15:38 +0000

You know what’s authentic? A kid writing about his refugee family which fled a controlled/oligarchic/planned economic system and how that spurred an interest in a market, somewhat capitalistic banking system where “ordinary” people can get a mortgage, car loan, etc. And yes, for some kids, the interest is truly authentic and not manufactured. There are kids who have volunteered in hospitals and want to study operations management (or similar) and want to learn how to drive efficiencies in a complex system. There are kids who advocated for- and won- an extra traffic light on a dangerous corner in their town by developing a cost/benefit analysis which showed that the financial “cost” was far outweighed by the civic benefit- and that sparked an interest in financial modeling on a larger, more sophisticated scale. Everything about ‘business’ isn’t about making money and buying a house in the Hamptons.

I interview college seniors who have finished a business degree and cannot articulate in any meaningful or compelling way why they are interested in working in a business. They went into it to make money, they come out of it intent on making money, and it’s hard to plunge the depths of something that’s two inches deep. I’ve interviewed kids focused on “international business” who speak no languages besides English, read nothing that isn’t delivered on their phone via Instagram or Tik-tok. So if Adcom’s at top business programs are trying to at least balance the class composition by finding kids with a more robust understanding of “business”, that’s ok in my book.