Major in Finance
As a finance major at Merrimack, you’ll use analytic skills to project earnings and conduct valuations, construct and manage portfolios and assess an organization’s assets and liabilities to identify opportunities for global business growth.
What is Finance?
Finance is the study of money management and it powers the economy. Banks provide crucial loans to small business owners, financial planners set up plans for young families to save for college, and smart investing allows people to retire without worry. Finance in the right hands can be a powerful force for innovation, prosperity and social benefit.
Finance Major vs. Finance Concentration
Finance Major
- 10 finance courses
- Business curriculum + courses in credit analysis, equity valuation, fintech and crypto + access to student-managed funds where you’ll develop skills for future careers such as a financial analyst or investment banker
- You’ll graduate with a B.S. in finance
Finance Concentration
- Six finance courses
- Analytic skills + creative problem-solving strategies where you’ll assess organizations’ assets, liabilities and marketplace positions, and identify opportunities for growth, at home and abroad
- You’ll graduate with a B.S. in business administration with a finance concentration
What You’ll Learn
Finance is a key aspect of almost any public or private sector organization, making the field versatile and steadily in demand across many industries.
By majoring in finance, you will build a portfolio of specialized finance electives to match your career aspiration. In particular, you will:
- Examine the key principles that underlie the investment and valuation process
- Strengthen your analytical, problem-solving, and spreadsheet programming skills
- Deepen your understanding of the dynamic global marketplace
- Learn to solve problems using quantitative methods and to conduct finance research by incorporating major financial databases with real transaction data
- Access trading simulations and real-time market information through the Girard School of Business Mucci Capital Markets Lab
Hands-on Experience
The finance major will give you plenty of hands-on experience from the Mucci Capital Markets Lab. The lab is equipped with three major finance databases that are widely used in the financial markets: The Bloomberg terminal, the Capital IQ, and the Morningstar Direct Database. You can get certified and become a subject expert. We have the Merrimack Financial Group, an Investment Club, and three student-managed funds – the equity, the fixed income, and the crypto and alternative fund – where you can learn to manage real money among different asset classes.
Finance Jobs
A degree in finance will prepare you for a specialized job in the financial industry such as mutual funds, hedge funds, private equity, commercial and investment bank, and insurance companies, to name a few. Different from a business major, majoring in finance will prepare you to study a specialized area in finance, a financial technology analyst position, for example. In this case, you will have to show you have quite a bit of knowledge in the field of finance in the area of blockchain, fintech, crypto, and digital finance. Career options are included but not limited to:
- Fintech Business Analyst
- Impact Investing Analyst
- Financial Analyst
- Commercial Banker
- Investment Banker
- Research Analyst
