<p>My little sister will be attending Towson Unversity this fall and will be majoring in Business Administration with a concentration in International Business. Her dream is to become a CEO and her realistic expectation is a job in Human Relations. From what I understand, Business administration isn’t going to make her valuable to employers. Does anyone know for sure whether the degree will even teach her skills that employers want? </p>
<p>Anyways, I mentioned Engineering to her, but just the word engineering makes her turn a blind eye. I want her to have good opportunities after college. She is smart, but I think she has unrealistic expectations for what a B.S. Business admins can do.</p>
<p>How can I explain Engineering to her in a way that will be insightful for her?
Which Engineering discipline can give her a better chance at the kind of career she wants?</p>
<p>You totally cannot convince someone who doesn’t have engineering in them to become an engineer. It is a difficult major and not for everyone. If she is outgoing and does well in her classes, looks for internship opportunities, and takes advantage of the career office at Towson to help her with that, she will do fine. Stop trying to mold her, she will probably do fine. Now… I will say that she might not find a job in Human Resources to be quite what she expects it to be. Those people spend an awful lot of time working on benefits issues and things that aren’t as “people oriented” as students going into the field might hope. But she will have plenty of other intro business classes that might help her find more areas of interest – marketing, finance, accounting, business law, operations, management information systems – you never know what will catch her interest.</p>
<p>I was just looking up statistics online. About 20% of CEOs have engineering degrees, while about 15% have business degrees. So a business degree can certainly get her there. And if it is where her natural interests and talents lie, then don’t try to drag her into the engineering world just because that is where you are most comfortable.</p>
<p>By the way, I am a woman with an undergrad business degree, and am CEO of my own company. :)</p>
<p>That’s a ridiculously misleading study. “Business” is only specifically the major Business, while “Engineering” combines a ton of degrees. If you combine business, finance, accounting, economics, etc, you will get about 40% business majors. Not to mention most CEO hires don’t actually work in engineering and it’s a post hoc fallacy.</p>
<p>If she doesn’t want to do engineering, she probably shouldn’t, honestly.</p>
<p>There’s no point. If she doesn’t see it, she doesn’t see it. Personally I never see myself pursuing a business degree, and I never will Just the opposite of your sister</p>
<p>I second what everyone else has said. You have to naturally have a love for engineering in you. If you don’t, it will be hard to stay motivated and want to continue when the going gets tough. You are always going to need people with backgrounds in business. You should be encouraging her to pursue business, not trying to push her toward another field.</p>
<p>Since she is not interested in engineering, the better question is which business discipline will give her a better chance at the kind of career she wants. In my mind, international business and human relations make it much less likely that she can attain her goal of becoming a CEO. To become a CEO, one has to know the money and one has to know the customers. This would point a business major in the direction of finance/accounting or marketing.</p>
<p>Actually, business studies can be totally appropriate. First of all, they are about running businesses, we all know that everything that is produced or done, involves some sort of business interactions.</p>
<p>Secondly, business majors often excel in areas where engineering majors fail, human relations. The point of a business major, if it’s combined with the right kind of personality, is to train people who understand and more importantly want to attempt to coordinate businesses from the perspective of human interactions or company interactions. Yes it can be very pseudoscientific or theoretically trivial and yes there are students who think that they can become a CEO and make lots of money with a business degree and that’s all they care about. But that’s not the point, the point should be people with the right type of personality equipped with knowledge required to assist in running or coordinating business actions in ways that are harmonious between the different parties (and maybe even the environment and such). A good business person is like a business politician (a good politician), the point is to find agreements or win-wins between different business parameters or parties.</p>
<p>Those in professional or expert jobs e.g. engineering often can’t be bothered with business issues, because they either don’t understand them or don’t care about them (and running or optimizing businesses or business processes can take a lot of time and effort as well as dealing with entirely uncertain data or negotiation rather than facts).</p>
<p>Engineering is about finding problems, solving them and expressing your solutions to the world. A good engineer can basically do any job he/she wants, since all jobs is about solving problems.</p>
<p>the other problem with engineering is the average grades can be pretty low comparatively speaking. For example, if she is planning to get her MBA sometime in the future, she will most likely have a harder time with a low GPA in engineering (under 2.8) vs a higher GPA in Business Admin or liberal arts. It’s not hard to get a 3.5 GPA or higher in those subjects. So if she is not Math/science/technology geared… then she will struggle even more, and potentially get an even lower GPA which could also force her to go to school an additional semester or longer to bring her GPA Higher. The average American engineering student will graduate in 5 years anyway. Add the extra semester on to that.</p>
Just the opposite of your sister</p>