Original post by Little Toy GunIf you want to be an i-banker, Big Three is an absolute minimum, but graduating from Hong Kong is in itself a disadvantage. They'd like a top university internationally, and you will need to have done an internship. I know personally someone who did his whilst reading quantitative finance at HKU. But you don't have to study anything in particular in get into one, especially if you've got connections.
It's difficult to become a lawyer whichever route you take. You need to get a good enough grade to even be eligible for PCLL, and it's the same with LLB, JD, or for an overseas graduate. Law in general is better with a conversion course than with an LLB though, as an LLB takes a lot of time to finish. But there's no reason why they'd favour a JD over an LLB when a JD is essentially a graduate bachelor's degree for people with no background in law whatsoever. This is without saying the legal field is almost with everyone graduating from HKU, Oxbridge, and the University of Law.
You don't have to study anything in particular to be an auditor. Accountancy is not really that professional and the firms take in graduates from all disciplines. The only advantage you'd get with an accountancy degree is to be potentially exempted from the initial training, which would last for several weeks. Even then I don't see how that'd be an advantage when you could've avoided working whilst still getting paid. In the UK, they have been taking in even school-leavers because as a junior auditor, there's practically no skills you need to have before starting. Whether you become an actual accountant (CPA - Certified Public Accountant) has absolutely nothing to do with your degree, or whether you have one. You would work as an auditor for a couple of years while going for the examinations for the qualification. Some people keep failing, some people pass their first time around. But I don't see why you'd want to become an accountant - it's probably one of the worst jobs in the world. Even though it's masked as a 'professional job', you'd spend much of your day doing nothing (your work comes in the afternoon or the evening for obvious reason), and lots of photocopying and random work that doesn't require anyone with half a brain. You get paid horribly, both in terms of starting salary (below average even for a BBA, which in itself averaged below the overall average) and for progression. This is without mentioning the fact that you have ridiculous long hours because of all the work coming in later in the work day while the job being very unstable - one of the firms sacked literally all of their middle management to save costs a few years ago, and many people also had to go to work either on no salary or half salary. And unlike being a doctor, you get progressively more work as you go because you'd need to check everything submitted to you from the more junior people, In HK, many auditors have the goal to quit after getting the CPA, which is silly - who would care about a CPA if not an accounting firm and/or an accountancy job? With that said, people have different things they like doing so perhaps you can try the job out with an internship first.
If you want to earn big money in finance in HK, don't attend a HK university. Go to Oxbridge or London. If that isn't an option, I suppose Global business/IBGM would be the best option.