obviously everyone wants to do different things, but in general, what would be the most useful/flexible major in college?
Engineering its good for anything if you want to go to law school, they take no prefrence in your major, EXCEPT if you are an engineering major
Accounting is the most useful, imo. You have an actual set of skills when you leave college. If I was to do undergrad all over again, I would do accounting.
Thirded. You can come out with a Bachelor's degree and go straight to work in a well paying job. In addition, med schools looks favorably on engineering majors.
Liberal Arts It's all about getting the diploma. Get a well-rounded education in the process. Then specialize when you go to grad school.
Engineering, nothing else comes close. I would say Nursing is a distant second these days. But Engineers only need a bachelor's to get a well paying job, are in demand, and if you decide to go to grad school afterwards you will have a leg up on pretty much everyone else, regardless of the field you are going into (Law, Medicine, Business School, etc)
As a finance major, I would say Engineering. You can always morph over to the business side. Not as easy to go the other direction.
I'd say engineering or finance. My friends that did either one of those have good jobs whether they were great students or not. I think that if you are top-tier finance major, like top 5% of a good school, you can get a better-paying, albeit much more stressfull job than a top engineering student. One of my best friends in engineering had a 4.0 in plan 2 engineering at UT. He is making 60k working at Conoco and was forced to move to Calgary and now has to move to Norway. He said if he said no to the promotion, he would be stuck in Houston with no chance for promotion. My ex-girlfriend was 3.98 at McCombs business school and she is working in a small private equity shop(that is still alive) and making close to 200k after she worked in Citi's energy investment bank group for two years in New York.
That's assuming you go to grad school... not that flexible if you have to go to grad school to do what you want.
The most useful one is the one your most talented at. Do what you want to do.....and don't try to shoehorn yourself into a major/career strictly on a monetary premise.
Great sentiment. Except when he's trying to figure out how to make a living with a degree in 17th century French Literature (made up degree from Oh Haw Haw Oui Oui University - Houston Branch).
Did he not look very hard for a job, settle, or does he have poor social skills? I know engineers who graduated with lower GPA's from worse schools who made about 15k more. Maybe it's the engineering degree? Industrial?
Everyone knows a history major is a key to big bucks. On a serious note I have a friend that was a sociology major and now sells medical devices and makes 450k+ per year. I also have friends that have masters degrees in computer science and business and they're bummin it. The point is there are many useful majors in college. It's what you do with your degree afterwards that counts. There's a lot of educated fools out there.
