Is Williams good for business?

HuskyLawyer
Thu, 15 Jan 2015 20:58:00 +0000

BarrelBlaster, the key to answering your question is the answer to a threshold question: do you want to go get an education, or do you want to go to trade school? You want trade school? Go find a biz school and major in accounting. The accounting kids wind up learning more about finance than the finance kids do at the undergrad level anyway. If you’re doing undergrad biz, my experience, and that of everyone I’ve ever spoken to on the subject, agrees that the rigor in undergrad biz is in accounting.

If you want an education, DON’T DO UNDERGRAD BIZ. I have a BA in Philosophy from the University of Washington and a BA in Finance from the UW’s Foster School. I went to law school at UPenn. I am counsel to a large public company and my specialty is corp. fin (mostly project and other structured finance - a lot of private equity experience) and M&A. First hand I will tell you that the BA in Finance was a straight waste of my time, and I would have learned as much or more about finance in the econ department. The Philosophy degree serves me well every single day I set foot in the office. Someone will try and make the point that undergrad biz at UW is so, so, so much different than undergrad biz at, say, Michigan. I would dismiss that out of hand, because they don’t really know that, and the UW business school is pretty good. It’s not super elite, but it’s not low-level by any stretch.

Consider this, too, as you think through the problem. Why do most Ivies and Stanford not have undergrad business schools? Is there something wrong with those places? Is the University of Michigan, with its 50+% admit rate, somehow better than, say, Princeton? Dartmouth? Harvard?

Unless you REALLY need your first job out of school to be your last job, I would not encourage any 18-year old kid to go to a business school. At that age, it’s relatively limited in its utility for the vast majority of kids who have no context for what they’re learning. My advice to my kid, if they were asking this question, would be to go to a solid school and major in econ, math, physics, whatever, then work for a few years, and go back and get your MBA or Masters in Tax or whatever it is they happen to be chasing at that point.

The treasurer of my company, who is as sharp a finance mind as anyone I’ve ever known, majored in math at Duke and worked at Goldman for a few and MBA’d at Columbia. THAT’s how you do it if you want business.

One other thing. All the “trade school” people who would have you attend Babson over Bowdoin (DUH!) simply don’t get it, and they’re never going to get it, because they don’t want to get it, because, like common people, they can’t see beyond their own platform and circumstances. Oh Yeah! That’s another thing that a well-rounded education gives you: a broader perspective.

PS: There are senior executives all over the place who hail from LACs or majored in something somewhere OTHER than business. Don’t be fooled by the rhetoric from the “you have to study this precise thing” crowd. Seriously. Study something you’re interested in and that pushes you intellectually, and don’t waste these precious years of your life. YOU CAN ALWAYS BECOME A PLUMBER LATER IN LIFE. It’s really not that hard.

PSS: If there were one, isolated, skill, I’d want to develop in my college days, it would be to learn how to communicate well, both verbally and in writing. The technical people rarely run the show. You’ll find, perhaps much to your chagrin, that technical skill is considered what you were hired to do. The people who will rise to the top and manage those people are often not the best technicians. But they are almost always great communicators.