I'm considering a return to grad school for an MBA to eventually do work in investment analysis and equity research. I'm an excellent student but fear math and accounting courses as I was never good at those subjects. If my emphasis is marketing, how necessary are the math & accounting courses? Can I avoid them? More importantly, how essential are these disciplines in investment & equity research? Thanks for your time in replying.
Prof
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You can't escape accounting in an MBA program. You have to take financial accounting and managerial accounting. And the math in these courses amounts to knowing how to add, subtract, multiply, and divide. Moreover, for investment and equity research you need more than the basic accounting courses. At least Intermediate accounting and security analysis courses are necessary. After all, your research will amount to examining accounting reports. The math in accounting is not difficult. It is easy enough to add two numbers. What is difficult in knowing which two number to add and what the result means. Accounting concepts are where the difficulty lies. Without a good knowledge of accounting you can't be an investment analyst.
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jewell
Your top notch in accounting might be an introduction to bookkeeping, which uses little or no math. Bookkeeping is understanding what classes to file money in. Sales versus expenditures. Credits versus debits. It is all detail, very few calculations. And you must pay a satisfactory deal of awareness to that element. It is effortless to get mixed up. The only math you want is high college math. I've by no means taken a finance direction, however I think it requires utilizing logarithms and exponentials and such. All on the calculator. There's additionally in general some algebra involved. You will have to ask your path advisor what the maths standards are as the tuition has its possess rules. When you have no longer taken any math courses for a long time, you'll want a refresher course. You could audit an algebra type for that (no exams, but you still have got to pay for it, that's the cost).