Finance or Politics degree

I have been focused for the last year on doing a Politics degree at university. My A levels are Economics, Politics and English. Having geared all my extra curricular activities towards Politics this last year I am now leaning to swapping and studying Finance as I want to go into the city for a career. Any advice on what to do or to speed track extra curricular activites to improve my CV.

Reply 1

MindMax2000

Universities Forum Helper

Original post by Joannacr

You might be hard pressed to find a finance degree that doesn't require A Level Maths.

If you want to work in finance, you would typically need a professional qualification specific for the role that you want to apply for. Without knowing which specific role it is, it's a little difficult to say.

If you want to get into a ridiculously competitive role in finance with just a degree, then you would need to get a degree from a top end uni (i.e. you can do it with a degree in politics). This doesn't necessarily need to be in finance because a finance degree typically doesn't provide exemptions for the professional qualification that you would need for the roles. Those that do provide some sort of exemptions are usually for roles in financial services, and there are only about 4 in the country that do.

In terms of extra curriculars for your personal statement, you are usually looking at the following (most aren't that necessary so long you can express your strong interest for the subject):

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Reading finance related books - google for these, and there are usually a long list that you can choose from

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Mock paper portfolio that you can put together to demonstrate your ability to trade and use financial information

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Say that you read the financial newspaper often e.g. Financial Times

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You follow some of the big name financial theorists and you are interested to learn more about their theories

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You read some of the finance related journal articles

I would recommend going on Wikipedia to read up some of the finance related articles to get a better idea of where you want to delve into. Finance is not a small subject, and there can be various aspects and subdomains to it e.g. quants, financial history, financial markets, portfolio management, trading, investment analysis.

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