For many graduating seniors, having a job or grad school admission lined up before you graduate is an important and stressful task. Seniors are faced with finishing their thesis, handling their regular academic responsibilities, applying for jobs or to grad schools, and still enjoying their last year or last semester with friends they’ve made along the way.
For senior economic students, things are no different. However, as we go through the process of sorting out the beginning of our “real lives”, a lot of us hear this: “Oh, you’re graduating with an economics degree, you can do anything!”
Not as comforting as it sounds.
Anything sounds great, but what is anything? Over the next 1-2 weeks, I want to explore what the “anything” actually is for many Puget Sound economics graduates. This week, as the majority of our economics graduates go into finance, I want to look into financial advising.
What is financial advising?
As defined by Investopedia, a personal financial advisor is a “professional who help individuals manage their finances by providing advice on money issues such as investments, insurance, mortgages, college savings, estate planning, taxes and retirement, depending on what the client requests help with.”
Essentially, a personal financial advisor can help their clients understand complex concepts related to their investments by explaining them in a simple way and providing educated professional insight.
Why is an economics degree advantageous in financial advising?
Even if you have not studied finance, economics provides an understanding of money, markets, and rational decision making that is extremely applicable to financial advising.
Financial advising is just a tiny portion of the “anything” economics students can do with their education, part 2 on economic consulting coming soon.