So, you’ve recently begun college or will soon be applying to college and want to figure out what the best major is to pursue, in the hopes of becoming an entrepreneur farther down the road.

Before I go through a few decision criteria, it’s important to note that being an “entrepreneur” encompasses a lot of activities and types of individuals.

In the same way that different businesses serve different customer-bases, not all entrepreneurs have the same skill set, inclinations, or opportunities. For example, the Shark Tank star Mark Cuban, is a great salesman and has a very different approach to business than Bill Gates or Elon Musk, who are both technically-oriented and not as good on the sales side.

Although all successful founding teams share a common core skill set, the skills required to start a company can be divided up among many individuals of a founding team. The one thing that all team members must have though is an extreme level of passion for the problem they are trying to solve in the world and an intimate understanding of their customers.

That being said, let’s dive into a few decision criteria for choosing a good entrepreneur-friendly college major (I had 5 majors in college. You can read my story at the end of the article).

1. What are you passionate about?

Building a business doesn’t happen over night. It takes years to build up a customer base, gain brand awareness, and good product or service reviews. The best way to stay motivated throughout that startup timeframe is to be extremely passionate and love what you do.

Of course, there are some rare exceptions with technology startups that take off extremely well within the first year, like Facebook, or during the dot-com mania when Priceline went public within a year of launching. However, these examples are by no means the norm.

When you really think about it, you can build a business around any passion or field of study. To give you an idea of the diversity, here are a few examples:

• Enthusiastic about computer science? Why not take your coding abilities and build the next mobile app or explore an area that you care about, like cloud storage or encryption.
• Love science and thinking of going pre-med? There are a lot of mobile and web health startups out there that are taking advantage of the wearable technology trend. You could combine your love of the medical field with the current leading technologies to introduce a product into the marketplace.
• Interested in psychology? Psychology is at the heart of all sales and marketing techniques. Why not take an internship, get some experience, and then start a sales training or consulting company? There are a slew of opportunities in this industry, particularly in the digital space.
• Good at writing? This is what I was always good at and never knew how to use it! You could easily set up a blog, like this one, and start learning about a topic and sharing that information with the world! You could also set up an essay-writing or proof-reading service, or experiment with writing ebooks for amazon.

As long as you follow your passion, you can figure out a way to turn it into a business. Even if that passion is on the government side of things, there are many government-contracting firms out there.

First, figure out what you love to do or learn about. Then, learn the basics of business so that you can monetize that passion.

2. Intro to economics, financial management, law, and sales.

No matter what you are passionate about, it’s absolutely crucial to develop a foundation in basic business topics like accounting, sales, marketing, business law, and simple economics.

If you could only choose one of these disciplines to learn, I would recommend focusing in on sales. Understanding the buying process and how companies position themselves to prospective buyers is the most important business skill-set that you can have. However, no matter how much you might know about sales, you must also be able to sell, which takes time, trial and error, and experience. I gained this experience through internships.

The exact courses that I took in college which thoroughly prepared me to be an entrepreneur are as follows:

– Introduction to micro and maco economics (I ended up being an Econ major). I also found money and banking to be very interesting.

– Introduction to financial management (accounting and topics like doing a discounted cash flow analysis and present vs. future value).

– Introduction to business law.

You don’t have to take all of these courses. You can learn the basics of most of them on your own. If I had to choose from all of these, I actually think that economics would be the best starting point because it teaches you how the economy works on a day-to-day and societal level.

3. Don’t take programming – learn it on your own.

Inevitably, if you’re going to set up a business, you’re going to need a website. I highly recommend learning the basics of HTML and CSS and basic platforms to build a website, like WordPress.

Being able to code and make your own website not only bestows a certain degree of confidence, but it’s also vital for understanding inevitable technical problems. Once you understand the basics, I think it’s okay to set up a website on SquareSpace or an ecommerce store like Shopify, but it should never be done out of ignorance, particularly since you are so young and that kind of knowledge will pay dividends in the future.

If you plan to enter the technology business by building mobile apps or SaaS websites, it’s imperative that you learn how to code. You might not be the “lead designer” or “lead backend programmer” for your own company, but you need to know how to create a prototype and communicate with other programmers.

This also goes for any kind of technical component of a young company. If you want to build a physical product, you need to understand how the supply chain works and how products are manufactured. You might ultimately outsource the manufacturing, but knowing how it works will give you a high degree of confidence when dealing with manufacturers.

4. Take a startup business course – but with a grain of salt.

So, your college offers a specific “startup business” course? Should you take it?

One of the main reasons that I took a startup business course in college was because of the networking opportunity. I wanted to meet the teacher, who was an entrepreneur, and other students who were interested in launching ventures for potential collaborations.

Overall, I came to the conclusion from taking numerous courses at college that formal education is great at some things, particularly established subjects that don’t change like Chemistry, Mathematics, and Physics. It’s not so good at subjects that are constantly changing.

My college taught C and Java I believe in most computer science classes, but didn’t offer courses in the exciting languages that the majority of startups were using like Ruby on Rails, Python, and mobile app languages like Objective C and Swift.

Unfortunately, this translated over to the business world as well. The course I took emphasized on the business plan, financing, management, etc. which are antiquated topics in the tech startup world. Yes, business plans and financing are eventually important, but initially building something that users love is more important.

If I were to do it again, I would take Y Combinator’s online class “How to Start a Startup,” if you are interested in pursuing a technology venture. I would then spend the rest of my time networking at on-campus startup or entrepreneurship events, attending those in the local community, or interning at a startup company.

Remember, you don’t need to be an experts in starting startups to succeed in business. You need to be an expert when it comes to your customers or your marketplace and building products or rendering services that they care about.

5. Should you pursue an MBA?

I might make some parents angry with my answer to this – haha.

No, I don’t think you should pursue an MBA if you want to be an entrepreneur. If you want to be a manager, a management consultant, or work in corporate america, then I think you should pursue an MBA.

There are a lot of reasons why I’d recommend not pursuing an MBA, which are pretty much boiled down to a waste of time and money in comparison to the opportunity cost of just starting companies and learning from the experience. I’ll outline a few pros and cons below.

Pros of Getting an MBA

• You have a degree. Parents like degrees. So do employers at large corporations. You will be paid more than someone who has the same background and doesn’t have a degree.
• You’ll learn about business case studies and different approaches to management, which will sound good and be fun to rattle off when you’re in meetings or on conference calls.
• You’ll network with other people who are getting MBAs who might know interesting people or who will end up working at a job and they will be a valuable connection.
• It’s likely that there will be employer networking events.
• You can use the MBA as a credibility indicator when going to a bank or trying to get a job.

Cons of Getting an MBA

• It costs money, which you could use to start a venture.
• It costs time, which you could use to start a venture.
• It means nothing in the trenches. It won’t help you learn more about your potential customers, hire developers or partner with technical cofounders, or build things that customers want.
• What you learn in an MBA program will not help you operate on a shoe-string budget, when you need to be scrappy and think of creative ways to keep the company afloat. In fact, you might feel a little embarrassed from having spent money on an expensive education, only to have to now eat ramen and work out of coffee shops, while you talk with your friends who have six figure incomes with good benefits at big corporate jobs.
• It will not teach you how to start a company. It will teach you how to manage people and the theory of starting a company. There is no course that will teach you fully how to start a company, in the same way that you can’t learn to ride a bike from reading a book on riding a bike.

6. Your internships matter more than your major.

At the end of the day, your actual experience matters more to both a potential employer in the business world and it also matters more if you want to be an entrepreneur.

There are only two ways to get experience as an entrepreneur.

1. Start a venture, alone or with a partner, and learn from it. 

2. Be a crucial part of someone else’s venture and learn from it. 

If you’re going to intern at a startup company, make sure that you are getting your time’s worth on the experience end. Don’t just be the coffee boy doing rudimentary work. Ask to be a part of strategy meetings. It doesn’t mean you need to have a say in the direction of the company, but you should be able to watch everything.

I had a policy of never taking an unpaid internship in college. I had an internship each summer of my college experience. The only time that I broke that rule was when I interned at a startup company. I was willing to go income-less because I wanted the experience, not the money.

I learned so much from that company and the founder, who was nice enough to share everything with me and answer all of my questions, no matter how stupid they were.

Your internships will matter more to you looking back, not just what you learn, but also who you meet.

My Story

I’m not lying when I said I had 5 majors.

I came into college with the intention to double major in psychology and creative writing. I had done AP psych in high school and was super into psychology. I also was really into writing, having written a fiction novel and many short stories. I also took classes in the summer on the topic at Harvard.

However, I started to get bored of psychology and realized, I probably wouldn’t be happy living my life as a therapist, even though that’s a great career for others. I also knew that becoming a paid author was a long shot that no one should fully depend on.

I had a brief stint thinking I was going to major in criminal justice because I wanted to go into the FBI really bad to the point that I was 100% convinced that is what I was going to pursue when I graduated. I had taken 4 years of computer science classes in high school and before, so I also made the decision that this could my ticket to get into the FBI, since it’s competitive, and started getting into comp sci again.

Although I was driven to the point where I was going on daily runs and transforming my body to get in the best shape of my life, something didn’t feel right. It’s true, I had taken one of those self-assessment tests and I thought this could be a cool career, but did I really want to work for the government? It might be cool to be an FBI agent, but I realized after a lot of thinking and exploration that I was probably making the career more glamorous than it was.

I had a bit of an identify crisis and explored the pre-med track. I thought about becoming a nurse anesthetist or nurse practitioner because I didn’t want to be an all-out doctor. But, I had to admit to myself, I think I liked those careers because they were highly paid, not because I actually wanted to be one.

One day, I read the book Rich Dad Poor Dad and it’s like the stars aligned and I finally realized what I wanted in life with respect to my career. So many things about society didn’t make sense to me up until that point. Everything clicked. After reading more about business and entrepreneurship, it felt 100% right. I needed to do that.

I went a little bit crazy in the next two years. Not only did I compete (and win) the title of London Rising’s star with my teammates while I was studying abroad, but I devoured every book I could get my hands on that had the name business, entrepreneurship, or startups. I started and joined a bunch of companies. I also read a t

Never have I been so passionate about something before in my life. It wasn’t about the money or even business, it was about living the kind of life I wanted to live and making the kind of impact in the world I wanted to make.

I switched my major during the second semester of my sophomore year, decided to major in Econ without having taken an econ class (yes I declared – talk about ready, fire, aim) and took macro and micro econ at the same time along with taking business classes that I wasn’t supposed to because I didn’t have any of the 5 prerequisites.

If you had talked to me during this period of crazy activity, I would have seemed like a bit of a nut, running multiple companies and taking way more econ/business classes than anyone should in a time period.

However, all the information I absorbed has helped me in business and life. Ultimately, I went full time on one of the businesses I started, which very much aligns with my strengths I am still running that one and others to this day.

If you asked me, I would have never predicted this would have been the one to take off. It’s very hard to predict where you will end up in X years when you are in the entrepreneurial space, so learn as much as you can, follow your passions, and never give up!