I did my B.Tech in Computer Science at Amity University, then a PGDM in Finance at IMT Hyderabad. People sometimes read that as a change of mind. It felt more like adding a second lens.
What Computer Science trained into me
Decomposition, mostly. The habit of taking something large and unclear and splitting it until each piece is small enough to reason about. Also a certain literal-mindedness, an awareness that a system does exactly what it was told, not what you meant, and that the gap between those two is where most bugs live.
It also gave me a tolerance for not understanding something yet. In programming you are constantly in a state of partial understanding, and you learn that this is normal rather than alarming.
What Finance did differently
Finance rearranged how I evaluate things. In Computer Science, a solution is judged largely on whether it is correct and efficient. In Finance, almost nothing is simply correct. It is better or worse relative to alternatives, under assumptions, given a cost of capital and a risk you are willing to carry.
That was uncomfortable at first and then genuinely useful. It made me start asking what something costs, what it displaces, and who benefits. Those are questions that do not naturally occur to you when you are optimising an algorithm.
Incentives were the biggest surprise
The idea I found most transferable was that organisations behave according to how they are measured. If a team is judged on volume, they will produce volume. This explains an enormous amount of otherwise baffling behaviour, and it is not something I would have learned from a technical curriculum.
It is directly relevant to Business Analysis. When a stakeholder resists a change that looks obviously good, it is very often because the change is good for the organisation and bad for how that specific person is evaluated. Knowing to look for that has saved me from misreading people as difficult.
The connection
For a while I thought of these as two separate qualifications sitting on the same page of a CV. The thing that connected them was work.
Business Analysis turned out to be a role where both are load-bearing at the same time. The Computer Science side tells me what is feasible and where the complexity is hiding. The Finance side tells me whether it is worth doing and who actually cares about the outcome. Neither alone would be enough.