Depends on your interests.
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Basic Information on accounting:
If you like free enterprise, thank an accountant. No, really. While Accounting isn't exactly glamorous, it's absolutely central to any properly functioning free market system.
In a nutshell, if you major in Accounting, you'll learn how to keep financial records of business transactions and how to prepare statements concerning assets, liabilities, and operating results. It's a fairly technical and very numbers- and detail-oriented field that involves economics, the interpretation of financial data, and management skills. It's also a rapidly growing profession, and that's not likely to change any time soon because monolithic corporations, governments, charities, labor unions, individuals, and pretty much all other kinds of entities need accountants.
While it's possible to be a general accountant, specialization is a Big Thing in this field. Many accountants specialize in auditing, taxes, or consulting. There are also several professional designations within the field of Accounting. There's your garden-variety CPA (Certified Public Accountant) as well as your CMA (Certified Management Accountant) and your CIA (Certified Internal Auditor). Keep in mind that you've got to pass an extremely challenging exam after graduation in order to earn any one of these titles, though.
Sample Undergraduate Curriculum:
Calculus
Introduction to Accounting
Macroeconomics
Microeconomics
Statistics
Business Ethics
Workplace Communication
Taxation
Finance
Marketing
Financial Accounting
Cost Accounting
Not-For-Profit Organizational Accounting
Accounting Information Systems
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Basic Information for Finance:
Finance is a very professionally oriented major designed to prepare you for a career in financial management, which is the art and science of managing money or, if you like, the way people, institutions, markets, and countries generate and transfer wealth. It's a good major and potentially a very lucrative one because, these days, everybody - small businesses, monolithic corporations, charities, and governments - needs effective financial management.
If you major in Finance, you'll study things like commercial and investment banking, forecasting and budgeting, and asset and liability management. You'll learn more than you may ever want to know about money, stocks and bonds, and how markets function. You'll learn how to determine what fraction of a firm's assets (or your own assets) to put into different kinds of investment vehicles in order to obtain the highest return for a justifiable level of risk. When you graduate, all those baffling indexes at the back of the Wall Street Journal will make sense to you.
Upon graduation, your career can take many paths (naturally), but most Finance majors find jobs in the finance departments of firms; with banks, mutual funds, and other kinds of financial institutions; or in government or some kind of charitable organization. Some schools offer specialized areas of concentration within the Finance major as well - in insurance and real estate for example.
Sample Undergraduate Curriculum
Calculus
Financial Accounting
Cost Accounting
International Business
Business Ethics
Intermediate Accounting
Human Resources Management
Marketing
Macroeconomics
Microeconomics
Corporate Finance
Investment Management
Money and Capital Markets
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Good luck!
Answered By: *~-яκ-~* - 8/3/2008 |