Concentrating on a concentration

When classes begin next week, I will have to make an important decision about what classes I am going to take. One of the things that makes this decision more unusual than the ones I normally make concerning classes is that it will determine what concentration I graduate with from Kenan-Flagler.

 

I started out in the MBA program planning to do a concentration in finance. In the almost eighteen months since I have been here, I decided that I don’t like finance enough to make a career out of it but I still would like to finish my concentration in the area. Meanwhile I took a couple of marketing classes in the last two Mods and found the classes and the professors to be so interesting that I can easily take enough classes to have a concentration in marketing. Ideally I would like to finish with a concentration in both marketing and finance but logistically there are some challenges to this.

 

For reasons I don’t understand, the fixed income class that I took during Mod I does not count toward a finance concentration. This means that in addition to the two finance classes that I plan to take between now and graduation, I need to take two more to complete the concentration. The first problem with this is I really don’t want to take any more finance classes. The second problem is I already have found the four classes that I want to take for Mod III and taking more will push my schedule into five classes, which is one more than I would like to ideally have. The third problem is the only finance class that I can take that does not overlap with what I have already learned is a class called investments, which meets over Mod III and IV and counts as two classes. While taking investments will give me enough credits to complete the concentration, I don’t know if I will find the material interesting enough to keep me motivated for the entire semester.

 

The real irony of all this is that because the requirements for a marketing concentration are so much lower than those for a finance concentration, at this point I am more certain that I will be able to complete the concentration in marketing than in finance.