What's the difference between a finance major and an accounting major?

What's the difference between finance and accounting?

• Also, what should I know about finance if I chose to major in it? For accounting, I know that it's good to have a 3.0-3.5 to get a good job. Also, that I would need 150 credit hours to sit for the CPA exam. Well what about finance? Anything important about that field I should know? And what's the difference in the two.

• Answer:

  Accounting is a subset of Finance. Being a sub-set, accounting is technical and requires you to have expertise. There are sub-sets of accounting as well like tax accounting, fraud / forensic accounting, management accounting, etc. Coming to your question, you don't need to know a lot about finance when you are choosing your major except that it involves numbers. So if you like numbers, you will enjoy it and there are so many fields within finance that you can get into any field - investment banking, private equity, sales and trading, some financial analysis role in an industry, or into accounting to mention a few. Going forward, CFA is a good certification to have as most jobs in investment side like that certification. I am sorry but I am not aware of the credit hours requirement.