Programs What major is best for a career in finance on Wall Street: Applied Math or Econ?

[NextElement]

I'm trying to decide what major would be best for being a quant or an analyst on Wall Street. I know this is a route a lot of applied math majors go, but is that also true for Econ? I've always thought of economics as more philosophy and business oriented, while math is math!

I recently got accepted to IU-Bloomington, and I know they have a decent math program, so maybe it would be easier to just combine it with an Econ or finance minor?

What do you guys recommend for a numbers person who wants to keep career options open?

 

[Theorem.]

I would definitely focus more on the mathematics -you still have the option for something like a quant, but you really aren't restricted to that, there are many industrial jobs in mathematics now, and there is also the academic route of course. I can't speak for an econ major

 

[Raioneru]

I'm trying to decide what major would be best for being a quant or an analyst on Wall Street. I know this is a route a lot of applied math majors go, but is that also true for Econ? I've always thought of economics as more philosophy and business oriented, while math is math!

I recently got accepted to IU-Bloomington, and I know they have a decent math program, so maybe it would be easier to just combine it with an Econ or finance minor?

What do you guys recommend for a numbers person who wants to keep career options open?

Hi, fellow hoosier!

a couple questions for you first,
are you only interested in quantitative finance and financial engineering? or do you like economics/finance/Research etc . . .?

 

[NextElement]

Raioneru- Not sure exactly what it's called. What I'm interested in is probably more towards the statistics side, using math to predict companies growth or decline, stocks, etc. I'm not sure what category that falls under.

 

[Raioneru]

since those terms are unknown to you, you should look them up.
judging from your answer, seems like you're mostly interested in Quant Finance / Fin Eng.
Most programs will require programming skills, mathematics: linear algebra, probability and statistics (if you can PDE but I believe they will have a PDE course in their curriculum anyway).

Now most programs will look for students with a quantitative background such as maths, physics, computer science etc . . .
If you want to take economics classes, I would assume that they can't hurt you and if you do well in them it will show graduate schools your motivation to pursue a career in business/economics/finance.