The undergraduate major in Finance provides students with a background of knowledge and a set of skills to enable them to perform successfully in finance-related fields. These fields reflect both global and domestic dimensions and they include corporate or business finance, financial management in government and not-for-profit organizations, financial planning, investments, banking, insurance, real estate, and public accounting.
Advanced work in the Finance major features a problem-solving and decision-making orientation. Case problems and investment games are used and current developments in the economy and in financial markets and institutions are emphasized to help students appreciate the complexities of financial management. A student may choose the Finance major because of its universality, even if the student is meeting all or most of the requirements in real estate or insurance. Finance majors have acknowledged the quality and benefits of the major, making it one of the most popular majors in the School of Business.
Current Finance Plan of Study (2018-19)
Previous Finance Plans of Study
Career Opportunities
The field of finance offers a broad and varied range of employment opportunities for the qualified individual. Many graduates are hired by financial institutions such as banks and insurance companies as financial analysts or management trainees, while others venture into potentially more lucrative occupations in the securities markets and real estate. There are also relatively stable jobs in corporate finance such as forecasting, cash management, and controlling. The Finance major can also provide excellent background for graduate work in law or an MBA program. Recent starting salaries for undergraduates in this field generally range upward from the thirty thousand-dollar levels. However, potential is unlimited and some relatively recent graduates have made six-figure incomes.
Academic Internship
The FNCE 4891 Academic Internship is designed exclusively for Finance majors in the School of Business. The main focus of the academic internship is to expose students to the daily operations of a company and translate theory into practice by participating in real problem-solving experiences, which are directly related to the student’s career goals.
Finance Society
The Finance Society is one of the premier student-run organizations at the University of Connecticut. Since its inception in 2003, the Society has been at the forefront of assisting in the professional, educational, and social development of students interested in finance.
Education Abroad
Students are entering a global workplace and have resources to expand their opportunities to study abroad while completing their degree. They can take a semester abroad and graduate on time.
Student Managed Fund
The undergraduate Student Managed Fund invests using a set of principles first espoused by Benjamin Graham and later modified and propagated by the principals of Berkshire Hathaway, Warren Buffett and Charles Munger. We evaluate our common stock investments in the same way one would evaluate the purchase of an entire business: by looking for understandable, well managed, and competitively advantaged businesses at prices well below their value to a private owner.
Each SMF manager is responsible for, but not limited to, finding suitable investments in two assigned industries. To carry out this investment philosophy, the SMF team focuses on risk in its various forms, including:
- Business Model Risk – the avoidance of unstable or uncompetitive business models.
- Balance Sheet Risk – the avoidance of companies with unsuitable leverage.
- Management Risk – the avoidance of poorly managed companies.
- Valuation Risk – the avoidance of companies selling at an inflated price in relation to a reasonable range of true business value.
- Obsolescence Risk – the avoidance of businesses with a product or service subject to rapid change or obsolescence.
- Aggregation Risk – the avoidance of a common stock portfolio with highly correlated business risks, i.e. a portfolio of companies subject to interest rate risk, similar investment risk, or commodity risk.
Financial Accelerator
Founded in 2002, the Financial Accelerator was created as a critical element of the business school’s overall experiential learning initiatives. All of these programs have one common theme: opportunities for students to apply classroom concepts to solve real business problems.
Many businesses facing shortages of resources (time, skills, and technology) will benefit immensely from this union. A quality product will be the deliverable from a team comprised of the business executives and the best and the brightest University of Connecticut students and faculty.
Interaction with business executives involved in these projects is an integral part of experiential learning. Partnerships with businesses and active participation of business executives are critical to the success of experiential learning projects. The approach taken at the Financial Accelerator is to couple the extensive research and analytical skills and resources of students and faculty with business executives to find solutions to their challenges.
Link to FNCE Course Descriptions
The Finance major is available to students at the Storrs Campus.