I am an incoming freshman at college, and I have a dilemma. I’m currently registered with a double major in math (emphasis in statistics) and software engineering, but the problem is that I do not know whether I will be content in the long run with software engineering. I’m currently towards the end of my second engineering internship, so I know I could do it, but I also know that my heart is set on the business side of things, especially the financial aspect. I have my end goal set on being a CFO or such of a company.
With my math major, I might switch it to actuarial science since the classes are basically the same except actuarial science gives more insight into business and finance. That’s an easy choice. However, with my software engineering major, I don’t know if I should change it at all. I registered for it in the first place because of the job security benefits. I’m interested in doubling finance with math or actuarial science, but by removing engineering entirely, I feel that I am essentially taking a risk towards my future.
So should I focus my education towards finance? Is studying finance instead of software engineering worth it? Are finance and actuarial science even worthwhile majors? I’ve been so lost with this internal debate, so I decided to make it external. I appreciate any feedback, and thanks in advance for reading.
Every career decision we make incurs risk. We have no idea what the economy is going to look like in 5-10 years. I always point out that in 2004, when I was starting college, most of the social media sites we use today didn’t exist. Tech (and its partner, big data/data science) wasn’t really a hot job field - what most people remembered about it was the dot-com bust. On the other hand, real estate and law were both touted as lucrative job fields for new grads. Imagine our horror when we graduated in 2008 and everything had gone…upside down.
That said, you can’t predict the future, and you can’t completely eliminate risk. What you can do is study what you like, and follow your interests to a good career. Both software engineering and finance are very lucrative careers, and you’re lucky in that you like both.
Two things. One, only you can decide whether you can work a career going through the motions. There’s a lot of brouhaha about loving what you do yammer yammer, but the reality is that some people are really passionate about their jobs and some aren’t. And that’s okay! Some people just see a job as a place to go to make money so they can really enjoy things other than work. You don’t have to be 100% passionate about your future career. So if you like software engineering well enough, it’s good to develop and retain those skills so you have an in-demand backup. (Let’s face it - software is probably here to stay, and will probably remain a lucrative career choice for the rest of your career.)
Two, there are multiple ways to get to the future you want. Few people work just one career their whole lives. It’s possible that you can major in software engineering and start off doing that, then work your way up to project management and then corporate management. You could get an MBA after college and a few years of work to go into tech field management. You could major in actuarial science and find yourself coding in 6 years. Majoring in one doesn’t mean you have to rule out the other; I’m willing to bet good money that the majority of software engineers didn’t actually major in software engineering. If you have the skills, you can get the job, and you’ve already done internships and aren’t even out of high school yet. So don’t worry about that. Focus on what you want to study and do.
With that said, actuarial science is essentially a combination of finance and math. I don’t see a reason to double major in actuarial science & math or actuarial science & finance - that seems very redundant, and not useful. If you like business and finance and also math, either finance OR actuarial science does seem like a natural choice. You could also always do a major/minor combination: major in actuarial science, minor in software engineering; major in finance, minor in software engineering. Again, as long as you develop the skills the major doesn’t matter, and I bet a lot of insurance companies and others would be thrilled to have a software developer that had some experience in finance and actuarial science.
Try not to worry so much about deciding exactly what you want to do right now. It will be a lot easier to tell where your interests lie as far as college majors go when you actually take classes in these subjects at a high level. Going in as a double major is good because you can take classes in both topics, and then if one just is not that appealing after a while you can drop it or pursue it as a minor instead. Like juillet said, most people move around in the professional world between jobs, so even if you major in software engineering but realize finance is a better option near the end, your major does not tie you down.