Undergraduate students: We offer three options to BSBA majors: Finance, Pre Legal, and Real Estate. The department offers a Minor in Finance tailored for quantitative majors and non-quantitative majors; and expected in Fall 2014, a minor in Real Estate. We also offer a Certificate in Finance, designed to convert those with non-finance degrees to a Finance Major. And, expected in Fall 2014, we will offer a Certificate in Real Estate. These programs are designed to prepare majors and non-majors for a variety of careers in finance and real estate. The minor in finance is also be valuable to non-majors for advanced stages of their non-finance careers.
Graduate Students: We offer a Concentration in Finance to MBA students, and a Master of Science in Business Administration (MSBA) with an Option in Finance. The MBA program is geared for the needs of most students to provide deeper finance training required to progress in management. The MSBA is geared toward students with specialized research needs.
Why study finance? There are a variety of finance career paths leading to the upper levels of corporate management, advisory, banking, portfolio management, trading, and analyst positions in the securities industry, and consulting, to name a few. Most can be highly lucrative. Go to our Finance Careers tab for a link to descriptions of traditional finance careers. Even if you do not pursue a career in finance, at the higher levels of management, as an entrepreneur, or as an independent businessman, you will have to make a number of financial decisions and they will determine your success or failure. Might as well grab the bull by the horns, and make him yours.
What do you study? Fundamentally, you study how to value cash-flows, businesses, capital projects, and financial securities, and how to make investment decisions. These could be small decisions such as in deciding what assets (stocks, bonds, and derivatives) to include in your own investment portfolio, when to buy those securities and when to sell them, or, major capital decisions, such as whether to build a factory, produce a line of goods, buy or lease machinery. Depending on the courses taken you will learn how to value a corporation and its stock, forecast its earnings growth, how value foreign capital and immunize those cash-flows against currency fluctuations, how to value a derivative product, or build and manage a bond portfolio. Entire careers are built on this information, and fortunes are. Only a fool neglects finance.
Other Programs: Students of finance who qualify may join the campus' Eta chapter of Beta Gamma Sigma, the national honor society for business, and the Financial Management Association, the national honor society for finance. They also may join the campus chapters of Golden Key and Phi Kappa Phi national honor societies which are open to qualified students in all academic disciplines. In addition, numerous scholarships are available to students in all disciplines who meet established criteria.