<p>I am a junior majoring in accounting. Right now I have zero interest in becoming a public accountant working for a big 4. I enjoy corporate finance much more and interaction with people.</p>
<p>So my question is how do employers view an accounting major for such entry level positions as a financial analyst, etc?</p>
<p>Would I be better off majoring in finance?</p>
<p>On a side note, how are employers viewing the MIS degree currently. I’ve been told everything from it’s one of the best upcoming majors to it’s to watered down.</p>
<p>For MIS you should look at placement stats at your school’s career center. </p>
<p>For accounting/finance, it might not be too late to switch to finance with a minor in accounting. I can see how Cost Accounting, Intermediate I and II apply to other disciplines. You can get those and whatever else you need to have a minor in accounting and skip audit or tax or whatever else accounting majors need that you don’t care to learn. </p>
<p>Make sure finance majors do well at your school in terms of job placement. That’s still a hard hit industry and they care more about school reputation than I think the accounting industry does.</p>
<p>MIS degree= most highly respected business major, but don’t look so good compared to a computer science major. I was going to do MIS until I realized that a computer science major with a business minor qualifies for every position an MIS major can do, but many positions an MIS major can’t do. </p>
<p>MIS would be good to major in right now because it’s in that near-perfect equilibrium where it’s up-and-coming and highly respected (relative to other business majors), but not yet trendy enough (like finance and accounting) for its popularity to dilute it’s value.</p>
<p>To answer your question about whether an accounting degree qualifies you for financial analyst positions, here are the top 5 relevant results from an indeed search for: “entry level” financial analysts:</p>
<p>MIS is highly respected here, they get paid the most anyway. My guess is more CS majors are outsourced/H-1B’d than MIS, that’s just my sense of things.</p>
<p>I would say that MIS is highly respected. Every university that posts there career center stats, usually prove that MIS is always the highest paid business major. They are on par, at least, with the engineering majors.</p>
<p>When I talk about computer science I am NOT referring to computer programming or basic tech support. That would be like getting a business degree in order to be a customer service associate or a retail sales rep. I am referring to people who have jobs as software engineers (the guys who design and develop the systems that are then coded by the Indians), computer systems analysts, network and database administrators, and information systems managers, among many others. The United States is still the world’s leader in technology innovation (followed closely by Japan) and technology is growing faster than any other industry by far. Certain sectors of the healthcare industry may compare, but eventually technology will start to swallow up some of their jobs too. I don’t think people get it quite yet. Microcomputer technology is just barely starting a revolution similar to the one industrial technology went through starting 150 years ago, although I expect the computer revolution to be more intense and last longer. It’s already changing society in dramatic ways and it’s only the beginning. </p>
<p>A common misconception is that the outsourcing of menial programming jobs is somehow a bad thing. It is a bad thing for the Americans who made their living programming, but it’s a good thing for our society overall. It’s a basic economic principle called comparative advantage and what it does is allow America to specialize in more profitable and worthwhile activities, like the development and engineering of new, innovative technology and the improvement of existing systems, instead of spending the valuable time that could be spent in those activities doing menial programming labor.</p>
<p>You know, when calculators were first invented a lot of people lost their businesses and their jobs. These people owned or worked in companies that manufactured slide rulers which were soon made obsolete by the new invention. However, society as a whole, and economic productivity as a whole, has been incredibly benefitted by the invention of the calculator.</p>
<p>I’m not talking about the outsourcing of menial programming, I’m more concerned about the outsourcing of serious work. There’s tens of millions of Indian IT engineers out there capable of a lot more than the Dell call center equivalent of computer programming. Look at various MBA application oriented forums and you’ll see hordes of them with their 700+ GMAT’s trying to find a way to get to the US…</p>
<p>"The kind of job that can be outsourced tends to be a sort of labor intensive programming task, not a conceptual one. </p>
<p>The types of jobs that get outsourced are the uncreative grunt work, Sarna said.</p>
<p>In addition to the opinion that companies only outsource menial computer science tasks, there is an overall feeling that companies would prefer not to outsource. </p>
<p>Ezra Katz 09 explained that the software development company that he worked for this past summer has a division in India, but due to poor communication, the company was laying off many of their employees there.</p>
<p>They werent producing what they were asked to produce, Katz explained. A benefit of having development in the United States is that you get to work closely with your developer and ultimately the quality of the work is better, he said.</p>
<p>Santorello put it simply, Getting half way across the world is a pain in the ass.</p>
<p>“What about “outsourcing?” Truth is, only 2-3% of all computer science jobs are being outsourced overseas and these tend to be the dull menial jobs. And that number is more than offset by the number of new positions opening up here in the U.S.”</p>
<p>The disparity has those in the field scratching their heads. “The major ought to be appealing,” said Zweben. “All the Bureau of Labor Statistics forecasts and anything you want to look at economically say computing people are in demand. The job market is very good for the graduates.” </p>
<p>“There’s every reason to believe this has turned around and is coming back,” Lazowska said. “There’s a buzz back—both around the excitement of the field and the employment possibilities.” </p>
<p>Lazowska believes the misperception about computer scientists’ job prospects will take care of itself. “People understand that now we’re having a boom in startup companies again, and that entry-level salaries are up, and that offshoring isn’t something that’s making a significant dent.”</p>
<p>But where the computing community could do a better job, he said, is in spreading word of computer science’s capacity to change the world and tackle important issues, from healthcare to safety to climate change.</p>
<p>He recalls having to reassure prospective students and their parents that the industry would bounce back. “I asked them to think about whether computing is going to be an area that is going to be in demand for society—not just for computing jobs but for jobs that support other disciplines. It was hard to sell that to people, but I kept telling the story and eventually it proved to be more or less right.” </p>
<p>“We have to help people understand that computer science is a field where you can affect and improve people’s lives as opposed to a field where you can just make a buck,” Lazowska said. “Many of the things people care about—transforming healthcare so we have better knowledge of treatments, or reducing auto accidents, or transforming the conduct of science through new approaches to science in mountains of data. All of these are advances that people care about and are fundamentally at their heart computer science.”</p>
<p>“Well, the rumors of CS’s death have been greatly exaggerated. The real problem is the pendulum of perception has gone too far. Yes, outsourcing is a problem, but it turns out that it’s not a catastrophe. Many U.S. companies don’t want to take out detailed contracts with a consultancy in Mumbai — they just want someone to do their programming. And they’re willing to pay for it. As a result, there’s a shortage of qualified, experienced programmers in the United States, as anyone on headhunters’ e-mail lists (and therefore keeps getting daily beseeching e-mails) can attest to. If I were tempted to live in New York City, it would be pretty easy for me to pick up a job that paid $100 per hour or more.”</p>
<p>“The movement of computing work abroad represents an economic and scientific challenge, but the fears of job migration far outweigh the reality so far, according to a new study by the Association for Computing Machinery.”</p>
<p>The study concluded that dire predictions of job losses from shifting high-technology work to low-wage nations with strong education systems, like India and China, were greatly exaggerated. </p>
<p>Though international in perspective, the study group found that the most likely prognosis for the United States would be that 2 percent to 3 percent of the jobs in information technology would go offshore annually over the next decade or so. </p>
<p>But more jobs will be created than are lost in the future, they said, as long as the industry in America moves up the economic ladder to do higher-value work — typically, applying information technology to other fields, like biology and business. They noted that employment in the information technology industry was higher today than it was at the peak of the dot-com bubble, despite the growth of offshore outsourcing in the last few years. </p>
<p>“The global competition has gotten tougher and we have to run faster,” said Moshe Y. Vardi, co-chair of the study group and a computer scientist at Rice University. “But the notion that information technology jobs are disappearing is just nonsense. The data don’t bear that out.”</p>
<p>Corporate recruitment of top computer science grads has remained steady throughout the economic downturn. Last spring, at the height of the recession, Georgia Tech’s College of Computing had the highest job placement rate of any major on campus and the highest starting salary.</p>
<p>“We had placed 87% of our undergraduates in jobs as of last spring,” says Cedric Stallworth, Assistant Dean of Undergraduate Enrollment at Georgia Tech’s College of Computing. “The financial sector credit card companies, insurance companies are very much interested in computer science students, as are defense companies and software development and networking companies.” </p>
<p>Computer science grads from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign are being recruited by software, healthcare, trading and agricultural companies. Last year’s grads received an average of 2.3 job offers and had an average starting salary of more than $72,000 the highest of any starting salary in the university’s College of Engineering. </p>
<p>“We really didn’t see a drop in recruiting efforts,” says Cynthia Coleman, associate director of external relations for the University of Illinois’ Department of Computer Science. “We have seen a significant increase in companies in other industries that typically haven’t recruited in computer science interested in our students. What a lot of our students are going to realize is that every industry has computer science needs.”</p>
<p>“Overall, employment of computer software engineers and computer programmers is projected to increase by 21 percent from 2008 to 2018, much faster than the average for all occupations. This will be the result of rapid growth among computer software engineers, as employment of computer programmers is expected to decline.”</p>
<p>“As with other information technology jobs, offshore outsourcing may temper employment growth of computer software engineers. Firms may look to cut costs by shifting operations to foreign countries with lower prevailing wages and highly educated workers. Jobs in software engineering are less prone to being offshored than are jobs in computer programming, however, because software engineering requires innovation and intense research and development.”</p>