Slashdot Mirror
Non-Traditional Career Routes?
Dave Bieler asks: "With such
a broad range of interests in science and technology, it was not easy for
me to decide on a major in college. Currently, I am an Electrical
Engineering major at Penn State, however I have considered several other
majors: Computer Science, Computer Engineering, and Physics. Since
science and technology is booming, it may be possible to get into a career
in an area other than that traditionally associated with certain majors. ex -
a Physics major becoming a Computer Security specialist. I'm curious to
hear about any careers that were preceded by non-traditional paths."
Speaking as an Electrical Engineer who decided to drop that and go into
computers, this question strikes a bit of a chord with me. Has anyone
else gone to college intending to prepare for one career, only to fall
into another, either by luck or design?
Started as a music education major.. did a little in computer science, now fix PC's for a major corporation.
{} ------ When I think of a good sig, I'll put it here
Don't we get these questions at least once a month asking about:
:)
"What should I major in"
"Is this major better"
"What did you do with your major"
etc...etc...etc...?
I just seems to me that we do. Mod me down, karma cap lets me be like this
Get your Unix fortune now!
IIRC, the percentage of people who have careers that have a different focus then their college major is something like 70%.
That seems pretty accurate based on what's happened with the people I know. Of course, this could be one of those 80% of statistics that are made up on the spot...
I've found that I work best in environments where I'm given an assortment of tasks and left to my own devices. I spend a majority of my time on RM, but I also act as my boss's "go-to" guy. It's really nice 'cause it gives me leave to operate somewhat outside the normal chain of command in our engineering organization (I'm not senior to, say, the development lead, but I'm not *under* them, either).
Not sure if this would work outside of a mid-size startup, but it's something I enjoy. And it has very little to do with 19th century west-central Wisconsin farm communities.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
I think EE is offers an unusually wide range of options - we do hundreds of different things. But most majors offer some diversity. As long as you don't go into elementary ed, you can customize your path as much as you want in the real world, it seems.
spacefem.com
I graduated with a Political Science degree, intending to go to law school after a short hiatus. I went to work for a computer reseller and moved into their training branch. That experienced gave me the skills to go into web and database work. Then I went back and got a Masters in Computer Information Systems.
In chatting with other poli sci grads, I found that a suprising number work in computer fields...
Don't let anyone fool you - poli sci is a worthless degree...
Disclaimer: There is no guarantee that the content has been read or understood
I was attending college as an EE/CS double-major. After about a year, I went into graphics design.
Currently, I am taking some time off to pursue more "traditional" skills. Partly because I'm curious, partly because it's a bit of a rarity for 'normal people' and/or nerds like us to get into these fields
I'm taking some blacksmithing courses, and am signing up for a small-engine repair class later next month.
Diversify, baby
--- Do you believe in the day?
Heh, what the hell are we supposed to say to this? Ok sure, yeah you can train in one field and go into another, in fact it's not even that uncommon, but what do you want me to tell you to do it that way on purpose? I don't think so.
Generally speaking, you should try to major in the field you intend to make a career out of.
Sigs are awesome huh?
I'll probably get some heat off this sd but in my experience its easier to move towards CS with a different degree than the other way around. I know of a number of people with various engineering degrees now doing CS for a living. I don't know of anyone with a CS degree doing mechanical or electrical engineering though.
I had much the same problem deciding a major while in college. I ended up going for an ECE (Computer Engineering) degree. Its really a mix of CS and EE which worked great for me.
One should not theorize before one has data. -Sherlock Holmes-
I have a master's degree in English Literature, with an emphasis on Early English Literature and Folklore. I have presented a paper at a conference, had it published in the proceedings, and was probably going to pursue a doctorate.
But I met my wife, moved to the city where she lived and needed something to do. Pursuing a doctorate in her city would have been problematic (Ask me about in-state school rivalries sometime you want an earful.) so I went in to law school, figuring if I made it out I could do wills and real estate transactions.
While there, I worked on the college's computers. This wasn't a big leap since I had been using and playing with computers since I was making sprites move on my old Commodore 64 and figuring out how to cheat at Jumpman. I turned that part time student job into a full time job and dropped out of law school.
So that's the story of how a guy who used to have the tale type index numbers memorized now sets up webservers, writes code for a Novell network, and when needed does helldesk.
Well, I was a Physics major with a minor in EE, and I'm about as hirable as a man with leprosy. IT people don't care how much I know, and most of them aren't even willing to find out. Stick with something closer to computer science.
Actually, something like 50% of college-grads are employed in fields other than their college major.
Minor in humanities & a language and major in Electrical Engineering.
You'll be all set for a career in telecom, computers, power industry, physics, applied research, math, & I'm sure there's other stuff. Plus you won't be a boring know nothing and knowing another language helps you have adventures (job, career, contract, etc.) in other countries.
Physics is too damn narrow, and the goal of computer science is to eliminate computer scientists. With an engineering degree you can't go wrong.
[o]_O
I have a BS and MS in EE. It gets me interviews but I program exclusively these days. It seems to me that it does carry some level of respect for the person who gets the degree, it isn't a cake walk. Occasionally I use my DSP education in my work, but not that often.
For the most part, I get the satisfaction of knowing in intimate detail how most things electrical work. Sometimes it even impresses women at parties who have had too much to drink.
I guess the bottom line is, if your enjoy the subject matter, stick with it. If you can accomplish finishing that degree, you can do almost anything.
I have a physics degree, and I work with XML developing a web solution for insurance companies. I find that day-to-day, I use none of the specific knowledge I gained as a physicist, but every day I use the problem-solving skills, observation skills, etc., that I gained.
Colleges and universities will need to learn that there's only so much they can do, and that education continues when the student receives their sheepskin.
Libraries are in dire need of programmers and system administrators - the values of libraries closely resemble the values of the Open Source movement, and libraries have traditionally been the overseers of information. Now, with the corporate sector moving in, the face and nature of libraries and librarians is changing. Unfortunately, librarians are slow to accept these changes, due to the need of a new set of skills, overprotectiveness of their traditional duties and roles, and because the unknown is always a scary thing. The more librarians-to-be who acquire technology skills in relation to libraries, the better chance libraries will continue to thrive and maintain their role as champions of the freedom of information.
"What we have here, is a failure to communicate." - Cool Hand Luke
a mortition? i am currently attending mortition school in Colorado. after graduating i will join an apprenticeship for the next several years before becoming associated with a local funeral home. i know it sounds creepy but i stand to make six figures annually.
I decided to pursue a Physics major, because it's something I find really interesting. Although I used to toss around the idea of becoming a CS major while I was in high school, I quickly realized that I would hate the schooling. And, after all, college isn't just to prepare you for the "rest of your life." It's four years (or thereabouts) out of your life; you might as well get as much out of it as possible.
What employers really seem to want is experience, not a specific degree. If you want to do something like this, jsut make sure you get some experience before finishing college. Having a major in another field will only increase the number of things you can do. And employers like that.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
I got my degree in mechanical engineering, all the while taking sys admin jobs for different university departments. I took CS classes as electives whenever possible (ice skating was always full). After graduation I entered the work force doing unix/linux development.
Eventually I'd like to optain a position that uses both of my skills areas. Some of combination working with a design team and the IT department. I don't even know what you would call such a position or if it even exists. Ideas?
I'd be a computer science major with a minor/double major in Physics.
My friends are CS majors and have to take a ton of Physics and high Math classes anyway.
- Nothing is true, everything is permitted
I graduaded high school class of 2000 and I had no clue what I wanted to do. Sure, I knew I had to go to college, get a degree, etc. I couldn't be humpin it at some store for the rest of my life. Well, I had been screwing with computers for some time so I said "sure! why not?" and signed up to be a Comp Sci major at my local university. God that was dumb. In my 5hr calc1 class I realized that I hate math. I had been always okay with it, and with good teachers had been able to noodle my way through pre-calc. However, when paying $500 for a class - i realized it sucked - just a little too late to get a refund.
Thats when I realized something very interesting.
I had taken 4 years of Spanish in highschool, a year in 8th grade, and a few summer plus program classes. When I started classes I was offered to start in a 300 lvl spanish class. I took Grammer 210 to be safe and went from there. What was sweet was that I got retro active credits from Span 101 up to 210. I got 18 credit hours for the price of 3. I then found what I wanted to major in: Spanish.
Now, before you laugh, let me point out that I realize this: It is like majoring as undecided. With a major in spanish, and then I can minor in whatever, including another language, the sky is the limit. Lets say I get burned out on computer shit and just want to use them in my free time - well, with a comp sci degree, that would be too bad so sad. With a language degree, especially in Spanish, I can get a job really anywhere. If I want to work for Boeing, Sprint, etc. I am in like flint. If I want to work for FBI, CIA, etc. I just need to minor in Criminal Justice. Even then, Its not a requirement. If I want to work in the tech sector, I am fine there with a degree and my tech experience.
If all else fails - you will find me teaching for my alma mater for $25k a year (in KS - that goes far) and summers off
The ultimate network admin tool needs HELP!
It's been quite a trip, but I can assure you it's not a very unsual one. There's a red line. Or, if you wish, an eternal golden braid.
"If you think education is expensive, try ignorance" - Derek Bok
I did undergrad in engineering physics, PhD in astrophysics, then found out that pursuing a professorship is a difficult proposition.
So I switched gears entirely and took up quantitative finance, and I'm now working on a trading desk doing modeling and risk management.
Kind of an unusual route, but that's the advantage of physics - it gives you a broad background in math and problem-solving that you can apply to lots of different fields.
Other people in my engineering physics class have gone on to do aerospace engineering, law, business school, programming, architecture, and lots of other stuff.
So: do physics. It's fun, suitably geeky, and it opens lots of doors for the future.
All opinions expressed herein are not my own; I haven't had free will since last year when aliens ate my brain.
No college/univerity, but been architecting Investment Bank trading systems for the last few years - and yes, we are making money...
Pick something fun to study at university (or "major in" if you're in America), then pick something that pays well when you graduate. Don't ever expect your degree to be relevant to your job. FWIW, we routinely hire engineering/science grads over CS for both s/w development and junior trading jobs.
"Business majors" generally end up working for HR...
This sig left unintentionally blank.
Park ranger in Yellowstone park, maybe!
No more late night calls, beeps or "gotta fix the server ASAP!" Emails. No more lost sleep, hurried meetings or pissed off customers...
"Please don't feed the bears." :-D
You'll waste your college years if you treat it like a career school. Get a degree in whatever interests you most. If you're really worried about your career, take a couple computer classes on the side or something.
A branch of science that is often forgotten is linguistics, the study of languages. With the advent of global communications technologies that make it possible to talk to people half-way around the world, language translation is extremely important. A double major in linguistics and artificial intelligence would give one the skills needed to begin work on automated computer translation systems--if you can produce one that is accurate and fast, there is a huge worldwide market for it.
I got a Higher National Diploma in Business Management, following which I did a really crappy job for the local council. Six weeks later, my mate rings up from the web-design company he works for saying if I'd like an interview. One week later, and bye-bye council! (Cheers, Fozz!!!)
:-)
Six months later, I left (well, got made redundant but luckily had a job offer during my notice) to be a VB programmer and general IT Support for a vehicle finance company. Best move I ever made
Just a thought.
If you want to guarantee yourself a job, try specializing in biology-related sciences. I realize that there's may not be a whole lot of overlap with electrical engineering, but there is some, and you should root out those specialties and master them. The medical industry, and in particular health and biotech, is huge and will only get bigger as more baby boomers get close to their deathbeds. I've been looking for IT-related jobs in the health industry, and the salary ranges are unbelievable -- like that of good IT jobs during the boom years.
My father graduated with an EE degree in 1970, and proceeded to do government work -- reliability engineering and whatnot. After becoming extremely dissatisfied with the workings of govt. contracts, he finally got a job designing computer systems for patient monitoring devices (those things that go "beep... beep... beep" in hospitals are now a LOT more sophisticated). He's never been happier.
The only common thread through these last twelve years has been a good attitude and a commitment to learn. I look for those qualities in everyone I hire. My staff includes ex-grade school teachers and philosophy majors, and all are doing well!
Helevius
mechanical eng. -> supermarket -> sysadmin that's no joke...
\m/
I started off with Ocean Engineering, even though I was determined to build a career as a Software Engineer. I always keept CS as a minor. It was a good decision, because I had a solid foundation in mechanical engineering. School taught me how to think, not how to program. And in contrast to some CS grads I met, I knew exactly what real-world problems could be solved with Computers.
At the same time, this approach backfired once. A company I really wanted to work for made me an offer, but their legal department refused to apply for an H1-B Visa for a non-CS person (this was a big corporation and an entry level position). Also, I found that it can be difficult sometimes to get a non-CS resume past braindead HR people.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
I guess you could say I had a non-traditional career path. I have a bachelors degree in music from the Berklee College of Music... majoring in Songwriting. Got a lucky break with a internet radio dot-com doing music programming. Within 3 months they moved me over to doing sysadmin for them. I guess all that bedroom hacking paid off! The dot-com is gone... but now I'm working as a Linux/Solaris admin for a major university. Now I can actually afford to buy all the great music toys I could never have as a struggling musician. Gotta love it.
--->auttie
Undergrad major: Creative Writing
Undergrad minor: Film Studies
Graduate: Library Science
Job: UNIX Sysadmin
#o#
O Moo.
The only three majors of all of my friends who actually are working in their majors are. Teaching, Computer Science and accounting. Basically everyone else is either working in computers or teaching at a community college. That should say something.
"as plurdled gabbleblotchits on a lurgid bee" - Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz. (One man's humorous is another mans flamebait)
I was always into computers as a child, so when I went to college I thought I would broaden my horizons and go to business school. Boy was that a mistake. Everyone in the business school seemed superficial and fake, and there were lots of cheaters, so I switched to CS and loved every minute of it. Sure there are conceded cheaters in every major, but a lot less in CS then in business. My advice: go with what your heart tells you.
People who have witty things here blow.
How drunk were those women? :)
You are actually choosing your subjects based on a future career? That's interesting.
In my view, few of us has any idea what we are going to be doing twenty years from now. We don't know which industries will be big, which will fail, or which all-new fields will be open by then. Especially at college age, you don't know what you will still like to do in ten or twenty years time (when you get upwards of forty, you start having a pretty good idea about it, though).
The way to choose your major is really to take two criteria into account: what subjects do you actually like; and what subjects will give you a broad enough foundation to be able to keep on choosing your path many years from now.
Majoring in something you really dislike just because there's plenty of jobs, because your family expects it, or because it carries with it an aura of status is a huge mistake. You might be doing that stuff for most of your life - do you really want to be unhappy with your job for most of your working career?Chances are you'll drop out - either at college or later - so you might as well choose something you actually like instead.
Getting a broad, foundational education is just as important. Sure, being a trained Cisco engineer pays a lot of money right now, but will it still do so in fifteen years? And what if you want to change to something else? The basic sciences are a good choice: physics, math, computer science, chemistry - they all tend to be useful almost no matter what you decide you want to do with your life later on.
Me, I waffled between Computer Science and Literature. I took CS and mathematics, and I haven't regretted it. Do I work as a programmer? No (though I might go back to that again in a year or two).
/Janne
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
I don't think it matters:
I have a degree in Philosophy and ended up as a developer via support...
Personally, I covered my bases (degrees in CS, physics, *and* math). My job out of school was in programming, and half the people there had physics degrees. (However, many of them decided to pick up a Masters in CS.) It's pretty common for physicists to get jobs in CS and engineering. (Some physics research is basically just CS or engineering, for that matter!) It's also fairly common for engineers to get jobs in CS. It's less common to make a transition into physics from CS or engineering.
To the original poster: I'm a grad student in physics at Penn State. I didn't get my undergrad degree here, but I teach some of the classes (previously 213/214, currently 212), so if you want my opinion on switching into physics, I might be able to say a few things.
I got a BS in Civil Engineering then took a left turn. I discovered that, if you're designing bridges as a Civil Engineer, you design your first one in College, then every other bridge you design for the rest of your life is a scale model of that one. (a simplification, but I didn't see it as a particularly EXCITING career).
:)
That and I didn't want to build something that might fall over and KILL someone.
Computers were always a passion, but I didin't take CS because I didn't want to hear some Grad Student tell me I was wrong.
So I got a job writing Software for Civil Engineeers. It used my background, and got me doing something I liked. Then that job migrated to Network Administration, then Website design. (Now it's moving back into Enterprise server design and Security Analysis....now THERE'S a job that's not going away any time soon!)
I'm not unusual. LOTS of people get jobs that have nothing to do with their major. The BS piece of paper shows that you're CAPABLE of learning, and have learned the discipline to do so.
That aside, ANY Engineering degree will be worth more than a Psychology degree. (The most popular and easiest to get piece of paper at CSU.)
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
FWIW, we routinely hire engineering/science grads over CS for both s/w development and junior trading jobs.
I graduated with degrees in International Business (heavy in finance) and History. Then I worked as an investment analyst for Goldman Sachs; got tired of the suits, bureaucracy, and lack of creativity, so I ended up trasnferring to the IT department after 1 year. After a stint as a Systems Analyst, I weedled my way onto the development team (but got no respect). After 1.5 years in IT at that company I joined a software consulting company that finalized my transformation into a Software Engineer. Now I own my own software consulting company.
Major: Manufacturing Management
First job out of college: Software QA
Second job: E10000, and E5500 admin
Third job: Set up Cisco network 7220s, 5505 w/RSM, frame-relay, OC-3 ATM
Obviously my major had nothing to do with any of these accept that poor management practices are a lot easier to recognize. The second job the company didn't want to pay the going rate for sys admins and sent a bunch of us rookies to class. I knew a person at the company who recomended me for the job. Dito for the third job.
On my fifth job and all have been acquired through contacts...
I was a physics major, I thought with Physics and a specialty in electro-optics that I'd be working with lasers, etc. Not so. I got out of college and got a tech. support job in computers. Did that for a couple years, then got a job in computer networking. Now, 10 years later, I'm managing (sysadmin/webmaster) one of the larger websites in the world, for one of the largest companies in the world. Go figure.
I'd highly recommend physics...it makes you think.
I work in the telecom/IT area; some of the best people I know don't have degrees at all.
That said, I don't think they would have been able to rise so high in a non "bubble" environment. A degree is a good idea these days. I recommend electrical engineering. It gives you a good overview of physics, you get to learn what the hardware is really doing, and you have to know how to program anyway. I know lots of EE's that work in programming, business and marketing, etc...
It's a very flexible degree in the "high tech" areas. I went from being a technician to being a network engineer while getting my degree. I've done stints in technical marketing, design engineering (systems level), and now I'm in business development. It's a blast!
The only job security today is the ability to get another job. Get a degree that's flexible, then follow your interests. It works for me. (Your Mileage May Vary. Please see dealer for details. Offer not valid in some dimensions)
-- Lou
-- "Stamp out phase jitter"
Very few people actually get a job/career in the field they were educated for. College is just a stamp to put on your forehead showing future employers "I know how to follow your rules. I know how to obey. I know how not to make waves and go through the pre-set path you and acedamia have established for me and require of me".
Your major doesn't really matter when it comes down to it, so just do what you enjoy.
Personally, I would hire a a mediocre non-college educated talent than a genius academia-produced drone.
My dad nearly got his PhD in Physics/Astronomy, but hated being a grad student, so he left.
My mom got a degree in Home Economics and fashion desgin.
Now, they run a fairly successful fiber optics test equipment company.
The moral of the story: do what you love in college, and make sure you learn *social* skills that will help you suceed, because who knows where you'll be in 20 years.
At my current young age of 18, i work for Oracle and am in an Integrated Business and Engineering program at Lehigh University. With this program i will graduate in 5 years with a Masters in any area of engineering (biomedical, chemical, or computers - im not sure which yet) and also a Bachelor's in business. Afterwards, i am thinking about going into psychiatry and working with the non humanistic version of people's minds. Or making a computer human? Who knows? But, i think i'll have many weird and creative options to 'engineer' in either computers or other. :)
AJ
-------
artlu.net
Riparian systems at first (that's rivers in plain English), then on to Cartography (map making) when the Legislature decided yooniversitees were for communists and that farmers' taxes shouldn't be used, and that all sorts of programs needed to be cut because edukashun and nawlej are evil, and gives people ideas.
From there, Cartography was being taken over by GIS (Geographic Information Systems), which is CAD and databases hooked together. http://www.esri.com is the big name in GIS, for the curious.
Throw in all the various jobs I worked to pay for college like river guide, carpenter, housepainter, bus driver, writer.... Took me till age 27 to finish college because I never received any aid, and I never liked the school loans program. (Sorry, but a loan is not aid.) So I traded off longer school and the ability to have lodgning and food for no debt.
From GIS it's a short leap to learning how to manage the computers, to my current job of computer consultant and programmer.
Your birth is your starting point, and fate has some destination in mind for you. Don't take the direct route. Some people do, and they stay in the same job for 50 years and retire happy.
It's the journey, not the destination.
Since I was 11 years old, I had a insatiable desire for mathematics. I devoured every book I could get my hands on. Once I made it to high school, I felt compelled to advance myself through self study. This lead me to compact four years of high school mathematics, including Calculus, into two years. I spent the final two years of high school taking college-level mathematics courses.
Needless to say, I thought I was destined for a career as a mathematician. During my second semester in college, I took an introductory course in C because I thought it would be interesting. I wanted to learn more about programming since computers were a hobby for me.
A few weeks into the course, I learned that I had a knack for programming. I think it satisfied a primal urge I had to read, learn, and build new things. After this realization, I decided to become a double major in mathematics and computer science. I must say I have not regretted this decision once.
My former love has now become my hobby and my former hobby has become my love. I would have never imagined that this would happen. To anyone debating whether or not they should change majors, I say follow whatever your instinct tells you. You can always tack on another major or just switch completely. You will regret it if you do not follow what you truly desire.
I started out doing a course in Computer Science. However, along the way I realized that I wasn't all that interested in mathematical software specification, algorithm analysis, etc. I was more interested in design issues, and looking at how computers can be improved, not so much technically (altough it always helps), but more from a design standpoint. So now I am doing a course in Human/Computer Interaction. I'm sure there are many people out there who only find out what they really want to do once they've actually spent some time learning and know a little more about the domain they're in.
I have no degree at all, got kicked out of highschool (for ditching class too often). However, that summer I spent when I was 13 yr old with my atari 800xe and my blazing fast 9600baud modem doing basic programming must have clicked because I fell into unix like it was an old friend and am now a Vice President at a *MAJOR* bank doing developement for foreign exchange systems and starting my own internet services company on the side.
;-).. so go to college for what you love. Thats my advice. So when you end up as a sysadmin working at Argonne Labs on their huge-a** linux cluster or writing code for Motorola to do peer-to-peer wireless distributed applications, or some other really fun thing, you will have that Latin in the bag.. ;-)
That said there are things that I missed out on from college and plan on going back someday. I have a huge amount of respect for the EE's that design and build the hardware that allows knuckleheads like me write bloated software, I would love to be able to do the math that would help me understand if string theory reaaly is the unifying theory of physics, and I would really like to be able to read Thomas Aquinas's City of God in latin (cuz then Id be cool at parties..
I'm graduating in may from penn state. I started off as an EE, and am now doing Comp.Eng in addition. There's a lot of overlap, so if you take way too many credits a semester, you *can* graduate in 4 years.
I got a BS in math and loved college so much, I went to grad school for five years. Picked up an MA in econ and MBA in finance. Tired of school, got a job. Worked for a few years. Tired of work, went to law school. Now I'm a corporate lawyer, which I like, mostly, but I'm itching to go back to school and maybe do a PhD in CS with a little neuroscience thrown in for good measure. My advice: stay out of debt to preserve flexibility, study whatever you want, and don't get stuck on the conventional school, career, retirement, death treadmill. There is no law that says you have to live a boring, conventional life.
After recieving my MCSE i managed to land a job as a chef at the fine "Wendy's" establishment in my town, so as you can see, i was afforded much mobility in my career choices.
Welsta Forbie nalk rilch fal yubbie welt hast grad.
I took Electronics Engineering, then switched to Business Administration in College (Canadian college/not University level).
Finally ended up in IS/software development and eventually design/architecture. I make $185k per year (Canadian $$, so whats that in US, 90 now?)
The best folks I have met in the business have come from non-traditional backgrounds. Typically the folks with CompSci degrees don't have the inclination to keep up with the changing nature of this business, or those who have gone to school to take programming just don't have the knack/aptitude. They may have passed exams, and gotten a peice of paper, but...
Heh. Tell me about it.
However, those were the shittiest CS topics I had to learn. It was made even worse by the algorithm class professor who was an arrogant son-of-a-bitch and believed that formal analysis should be carried on all software. After that it got much more interesting.
You could start a web-based community of geeks which sit around all day discussing nerdy topics while the cash flows in from ad banners. After it gets really big, you spend yourself doing more interesting things, occassionally breaking yourself away from your anime tenticle rape to get involved with the community by bitchsla-
Wait a minute...
Shit. Nevermind.
Why bother.
...Since science and technology is booming...
Umm, Cliff? Why are you posting Ask Slashdots from two years ago?
One guy I worked with years ago specialized in microcoding floating point units. Originally he was an Ag major, aiming to be a dairyman. He took the cheese-tasting course, the butchering, etc, but almost a senior, a dairy owner came in and presented his financial picture. The margins were too low. He'd never be able to make such an operation work and pay off any loan to obtain it. He had to do something different. So he shopped around campus and voila-- EE looked good. A new career was born.
Dogs look up to men; cats look down on men; But Pigs! Pigs can look men square in the eye. -Churchill
Foreword: I have a bachelor's in computer science, and am currently in a physics graduate program.
If you're truly concerned about the applicability of your degree, stick with engineering. If you're thinking about doing computer science, do computer engineering instead; you can apply your classes to either computer science or Real Applications(tm) once you're a bit further along in your career-making-path.
Likewise, you can apply an electrical engineering degree to almost any scientific field with only a minimum of further training. There's lots of theorists out there, and not a lot of people that can build the equipment that tests their theories.
The vast majority of what one studies in college has no practical application, unless you're looking at becoming an academic yourself. Engineering degrees are, from what I've seen, the exception.
I majored in Mechanical/Aerospace Engineering, dropped out after 2 years, sold cars for a year and a half, then moved to a company that let me travel and learned a TON of stuff ... left them for a job with no travel that paid 40% more... and now my resume covers all sorts of good things :-)
Most job knowledge is very heavily experience based. College gives you the skills to understand what it is your trying to do, hopefully. Most people have 4 or 5 full blown careers during their working years. Just do whatever it is that you find challenging and interesting. Most people don't enough to excell at anything so it's not that difficult for an enthusiastic smart worker to get ahead. AAAHTACK... jamej
let's see....played in a band for 10 years, engineered albums, television and films, moved into multimedia, then became an engineer.
oh yeah, my degree is in music/recording.
Never seemed to hinder me in my job searches, and in fact, I have never asked for a job anywhere. I have been referred for each career move along the way. The moral of the story is that if you spend more time working on your real world experience and less time stressing on your major you can do just fine.
I have an English degree (with a concentration in writing) from a liberal arts college, myself. After I graduated I took a job in a call center doing tech support, and eventually moved to a support position in the IT department at my alma mater.
The nice thing about working for a college is that most offer tuition waivers; which means that, if things continue on the schedule they are right now, I will have a BS in Computer Science in a couple of years and be able to move into a better paying (and more interesting) development role.
Please note that this is probably not the best way to make a lot of money; support jobs are hardly the path to wealth. But if you ask anyone who has worked at a college before, the work environment and low stress are a wonderful benefit.
--saint
I went to art school for painting, not at all thinking of having any career. During graduate school I was exposed to the Mac lab w/ Premier, Director, and Photoshop. This was early 1997... I found the internet soon after that, and have evolved into a programmer/DBA that can also do decent graphics work. And I'm still on a Mac...
i started out as a physics major when i had designs on being a pilot - then i passed 6' tall as a soph. and found out the usaf wouldn't let me fly anything with an "F-" in front of it. so, i went 180 and decided to major in early modern european history. i got interested in naturual history at the same time, and i like to read, so i wound up with a double-minor in anthropology and english. boy, did i graduate prepared for getting a job ...
...
the saving grace for me: i've always been tinkering with computers (the first was a ti994a, oh yeah!) so within a couple of years, i was contracting on little jobs while my fiance finished her master's degree. 4 years ago, i signed on with a large financial institution and now i work in operations management and support for internet/intranet applications. *exactly* what i intended to do when i started college, yup, definitely
when it rains, it gets real soggy. when it pours, i'm under the tap just _waiting_ for the joy
I began my college life majoring in engineering physics. In my second year, I switched to mathematics. Throughout my undergraduate years I held a number of CS related jobs: writing I/O routines for a Fortran Compiler, converting the university accounting programs from Autocoder to COBOL (the beginnings of grey hair), and doing programming projects for dull minded business majors who were willing to trade $ for their grades in basic CS classes.
I then entered law school, graduated, and practiced law for 20+ years.
I now am a Linux SysAdmin for a web hosting firm, and run a commercial salmon fishing boat in Alaska during the summer months.
I would say it doesn't make a damn what you major in, unless you're a dull headed business major who has to pay for class projects.
Interestingly, my circuitous route to IT helped me. I was very worried that I would be far behind the rest of the work force and spent the first 6 months of the job going home to read up on programming, project management, etc. What I learned -- and the CS majors would likely attest to this -- is that what the CS majors I worked with learned in college was not necessarily directly applicable to their jobs. All the people that I've met who are good at their jobs -- whether they have a degree in computer science, math, engineering, physics, chemistry, English (yes) -- read and stay current.
Well.. Subject says it all really.
http://www.sgmlsource.com/history/roots.htm
Unable to read configuration file '/bigassraid/htdig//conf/14229.conf'
Geocrawler error message.
What you are suggesting is not at all unusual. Outside the tech fields, most people do not end up working in a field directly related to their degree. Even within the tech field, I know Mechanical Engineers who do Software or Digital Design, Physicists and 2 Chemists writing software, etc.
In my own case, my undergraduate degree is EE. I designed Analog & Digital (H/W) interfaces for PCs and some embedded systems for about 10 years before deciding to focus on embedded software development only. I've almost completed a Masters in Software Engineering and these days the only hardware I develop is personal projects in my basement.
Go with what you enjoy, the rest will follow.
I started University by wanting a degree in Political Science, and ended up with a Bachelor of Science in Psychology. The funny part of this all, was that during my entire degree, I was working in computers, and did tons of contracting for networking/security for the University I was attending (and getting a psych degree at).
:)
So, I guess the bottom line to this is that what the degree is in isn't as important as the degree itself.
I don't see much correlation between degrees and people's careers in the real world.
Most of the really hot-shot computer folks I know have degrees in English, or psychology. Just because that was interesting to them, and then they wound up working in computers.
Myself, i went to art school and have a degree in fine arts. Not useful for computers, but I don't think many poeple "learn" computers in college anyways. I was doing illustration and comic books, then wound up doing a lot of computer graphics (because it pays well) and now here i am working for NASA doing research for medical uses of technology. Each career step was perfectly logical for the choices and opportunities I had available.
This next year I'll be going to Kenya, Brazil, and possibly Afghanistan for work, and there's no way anyone could have pictured this career path back when i was in my first painting class debating what kind of canvas to use.
Don't sweat your major, study what interests you, and get a degree in anything. Having 4 years of focused work is all that a degree means. You're going to learn everything on the job that you need to know -- from your peers, and books in your own time.
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
I know how to follow your rules. I know how to obey.
Yeah, you can get through college by "following rules and obeying". However, you will not get excellent or even good grades like that. Believe it or not, original thinking is highly appreciated and rewarded in the academia.
Quite frankly I'm sick of the college dropouts and self-learned "geniuses" who loudly make claims that college/university education is for fools. If you think you're doing a favour for the young Slashdot readers by discouraging them from going to college, you're just plain wrong.
So, I just graduated as an EE and got a CSC job! You barely learn anything in college anyway, the majority of education happens when you start working. For me, at least. And, I self-educate myself quite a bit too. Classes really cater to those who can't teach themselves, at least in my experience...
I get the satisfaction of knowing in intimate detail how most things electrical work. Sometimes it even impresses women at parties
Oh
Vibrators ?
I have 3 degrees from MIT. A BS in physics, a BS ni EE & CS and a ME in EE & CS (EE and CS are one degree there but i was more EE.) Anyways I had some programming jobs for about 2 years after school but have been a loan officer at a bank for the past 6 months. I'm applying for an analyst position at Freddie Mac...my point? Any engineering or science degree is somewhat welcomed in the financial world as it atleast certifies you as a good "quant" as they call them.
Degree? Bachelor of Fine Arts, San Franciso Art Institute 1983.
I got from there to here by being really interested in computing and learning on my own.
Regrets? I find myself wanting to have more rigorous training in statistics and numerical proof systems. At the time I went to Art school I was recovering from treatment for Hodgkins Disease (cancer of the lymph system) and not believing in having a long life. It was the right thing to do.
Follow your interests. People who rise to the top are talented at what they do, work hard, and have an interest (passion) that fuels the talent and work. That brings success.
There's more to it than this.
Went into College to get my degree in Telecommunications Management.... Became a Firefighter/Paramedic. You never know how your life is going to end up. But Hey I get to play with fire.
MH
I went to college in the fall of 92 as a technical theatre major(lighting)... that didn't work out, so I pondered for a while. I had always liked nature stuff, so i went Environmental Science. then found out that I would have to take 6 semesters of high level chem. ick. changed to Biology. My dad was a pediatrician, brother is a microbiologist, and both paternal grandparents were geneticists, so it seemed to fit somehow. ended up getting my degree in Biology in the spring of 98. (only 5 years.. =)
What do I do now? the only (paying) jobs I have ever had have been computer related. Started out as help desk, and have moved up to Tier II Desktop support. Not a big move, but I am getting there. From what I know, I am not alone. Most people dont jump straight into their major. I will most likely *never* use my major. All that really matters is that I have a degree... companies view you as "trainable" that way. just proves that you can be educated.
I graduated from the University of Illinois in May of 1992, at the tail end of the last recession. I graduated from a class of 3 undergraduates (most Statistics people are in the Masters program). I decided on Statistics because it turned out that I had an aptitude for math, and not much else of use (I originally wanted to be an engineer, but I found out quickly that I was not suited for such a regimented approach to learning; math accommodates eccentrics).
So there I was with my expensive college degree and a stack of resumes proudly proclaiming to the world that I had met the challenge that is the United States collegiate system, and prevailed with a glowing B average. Who could turn down such genius? Well, strictly speaking, nobody. Truth be told, however, I didn't get a single response to my resume, despite how many I flooded the market with. Nobody was hiring at all, and most government agencies wouldn't even do me the honor of telling me that they received my letter of application.
The summer and fall came and went with no more successes. I did get some letters admitting to hiring freezes, and would I like my resume to be put on file for when they begin hiring again? So I laid low at my university job (statistician for an entomologist).
In November I saw an advertisement on the campus bulletins for Anderson Consulting (NOT Arthur Anderson!). They were to be interviewing the following week. I called the placement office to set up an interview, and they told me that only CS and Engineering students were being allowed to interview. Not content with that answer, I decided to show up at the interview site with suit on and resume in hand. When I got to the interview site, I walked up to the first Anderson Employee I saw and told him that I would like an interview, but was not allowed to ask for one because I did not hold the proper degree. He took my resume and said he would fit me in at the end of the day, about 3pm. I waited for six hours, and was finally interviewed. Being my first real interview, I was nervous as hell and thought I did a terrible job. But a month later, Anderson called from Chicago and asked me to come up for a second interview. That interview went well and I got the job. I asked the recruiter that interviewed my why they chose me, and they said that they liked the aggressive nature that I showed by showing up and demanding an interview. That's a consultancy for you!
The first thing I noticed in the training sessions was that nearly everybody else was NOT a CS or Engineering graduate. I worked with people with Philosophy degrees, Communications degrees, and even a PhD in Slavic languages. Best COBOL programmer we had back then (Hi Lee, if you're reading this!). I picked up COBOL quickly, already knowing C/C++ because of my Statistical Computing class, and was a top programmer within a year. I later moved to Price Waterhouse (an excellent employer, by the way), and then on to smaller and larger software houses. I never regret my choice of Statistics as a major.
I guess the moral of this tale, if there is one, is that you can choose whatever career you want, but be ready to go the extra mile if you decide to change career paths later. Software development is a forgiving career path, unlike Law or Medicine. That is the one saving grace of the field: anybody can play if they are willing to work hard and learn.
Opinions change daily as new information arrives. Stay tuned.
I don't know how non-traditional this is, but I started out not going to college at all. I was working as a file/mail clerk in 1991, intending to become a "writer," when the office dropped a PC in the mailroom running Wordperfect Office 3.1 on a Novell network. That was enough to get me hooked. Bought my first HP 386 in 1993 and began programming in QBasic and hacking around with a Netcom shell account. Still working as a file clerk, I moved into a paralegal job where I worked on trials for two years. I got that job because I was the only one who knew how to program a Paradox 3.5 database. After that, I transferred into the firm's MIS department and eventually wound up contracting/consulting (geek terms for "temping") as a Windows PC/networking guy. Now I'm currently testing wireless VoIP phones at a company in San Jose where I'm learning a lot more than I thought I'd ever need to know about RF and voice-over-IP. Still intending to be a "writer," though. -- anthony
Not too many schools seem to take that approach, and it's really sad, because universities shouldn't be trade schools. The goal of getting a bachelor's degree should be broad learning, mostly learning how to learn, actually.
If you're concerned about exactly what you're learning, I strongly suggest that you re-examine your priorities. Sure, you'll probably want to focus some of your energy on learning methodologies that are helpful in your intended field. But what you really want to do is learn how to learn.
It's a sad reality, though, that specialists are more highly regarded and paid than generalists.
I'm a hiring manager for software developers. As such, My favorite degree for someone to have is a generalist engineering/science degree with a focus/minor in CS. Second would be a CS degree, followed by CS/EE and EE alone. My experience is that people who chose specifically to learn the science of programming while in school are more likely to be good programmers than those who chose to focus solely on EE, Physics, etc.
Generally speaking though, I doubt that this is because they learned about CS in school. I think it's just that good programmers are more likely to seek out such degrees than they are to seek out degrees in Physics, etc.
I don't mean this as an insult to those people. Many of them are "brilliant" programmers. They can hack with the best of us. But, frankly, programming is almost the smallest part of being a software engineer. Design and debugging will take up much more of your time in real life (the more of the former you do, the less of the latter you will have to do in general).
Hell, some places, meetings will take up more of your time, which just goes to show that people skills are important even for geeks.
I suppose I'd have to say that for the high tech computer industry, CS/EE would be the degree that's most likely to be offered by your school that is the most flexible and most transferrable to other areas. At least, it's probably the most likely to get you interviews.
What you do at that interview is really what will determine whether you get hired, though. Learn to be witty and urbane. Learn to think outside the box. Learn how to read documentation and find obscure solutions in it. Learn to be arrogant about your ability to learn anything anywhere (just be sure not to be "arrogant without cause" :-). Those things will help you a lot more than learning to program or design circuits.
"graduaded" --- spelled "graduated";
"I couldn't be humpin it at some store for the rest of my life." --- awkward;
"Well, I had been screwing" --- improper tense;
"I had taken 4 years" --- improper tense. This is a common error. Try using the past tense, like: "I took";
"Grammer" --- spelled "grammar"; and
"retro active" --- is one word, "retroactive."
I am finishing my degree this semester in Animal Behavior/Neurobiology, but have been a sysadmin and/or network engineer for almost 5 years now. The degree is just paper, the real skills needed by any half-way intelligent person to succeed in a computer related field are just work ethic and ability to learn. Everything else is secondary.
KingPrad
Stop the Slashdot Effect! Don't read the articles!
It is possible to get a job in computers without majoring in Computer Science, but you'll have to demonstrate your interest (and competence) through hobby projects or extracurricular activities.
I'd estimate that a fairly large number of people in the computer profession have come out of other disciplines. A co-worker of mine was a physics major. He does networking support and software programming. I majored in History (and took several CS electives) and am doing database and web work. Hobby projects I did while at university, good luck, and connections helped me get the job.
One of the things I didn't like about the engineering disciplines at UWaterloo was their lack of electives. Majoring in something that gives you more electives is one option; another is to take the classes you want, knowing that it will take more than 4 years to graduate.
I also believe that, in the long run, a good worker with many interests is better off in the job market than someone who just concentrated on computers. Your career will demand more flexibility than you think.
Actually I should have added another option. Back in school for a teaching, CS/CIS, Accounting degree:)
"as plurdled gabbleblotchits on a lurgid bee" - Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz. (One man's humorous is another mans flamebait)
I study EE, but I have a job in software engineering. It doesn't matter what you study, what matters most is your ability to excel in what you do. Attitude blah blah
Marijn
I initially enrolled as an EE major, but after some difficulty with physics, switched to dual major in Geology and Geography. After graduation, I worked for an environmental services company where my education helped me out. Initially as a hobby, I became more and more involved in computer hardware and networking. I left the environmental company to work for a local ISP, and then onto a software development company where I've worked my way up the MIS ladder to become the network systems manager . I've picked up some more applicable schooling along the way, no additional degrees, just university classes in topics that interested me.
I did a Physics major as an undergrad, and then went on to Chemistry grad school. Things weren't working out as well as I had hoped, and I decided to try something totally different for awhile at least (on a leave of absence).
I've been working at a law firm preparing patent applications for about six months now, and I love it. I get exposed to the latest and greatest technology from many companies, and get to work with some really bright engineers and scientists. The demand for this work is high, and so, accordingly, is the pay.
If you like writing, and working with lots of people is important to you, I'd recommend a career in patent law.
1. You should do what makes you happy. The whole point of a job is to have the money that lets you do the things you really want to do. Pursuing a career for any other reason is climbing onto a treadmill that you may never leave.
2. It's would be bad not to change majors if your interests change. Twenty years later, the thought of being locked into decisions I made as an 18-year-old gives me the chills. It's easy to believe now that you know exactly what you want from life, but believe me, you don't. Learn the things that will serve you whatever you do--how to write, how to think, how to appreciate good things like art and music, and how to pick up women. This is your best change to learn that stuff.
3. Anyway, employers care about more than your technical training. Fair or not, the name of your school means a lot, no matter what you did there. Do you come off as an asshole in an interview? This will almost always overshadow your technical qualifications. Really, liberal arts classes where you spend a lot of time talking with non-geeks can help with this (although it's not a magic bullet, and you don't need to major in a humanities area to benefit from this experience.)
4. The world is full of developers who don't really understand their problem domain. Computers are pervasive everywhere, and there are always opportunitites to develop in areas that interest you. I think it's probably true that there aren't enough programmers that understand the subtleties of the problem that they're trying to solve outside the subtleties of the code.
Hi,
I'm British. Sorry about that.
Anyway, we're very lucky in Britain that employees are not quite as concerned about what your degree is in. It is not considered essential to have an MBA to work as an investment banker, or a computer science degree to work as a programmer.
I speak from experience: I 'majored' in Philosophy, became an investment banker, and dabble in programming. (Not bad for a man with a lower second...)
People should look at their degree as their last chance to enjoy themselves and do something they may not be able to ever do again. Use your degree as an opportunity as a chance to expand your horizons, not as a launch pad for a career.
At the end of the day, you can always learn to be programmer or a networking specialist: and your degree may not be the best place to learn those skills.
Just my ha'pennys worth.
--- My dad's political betting
I got my BS in Mechanical Engineering, but now I do modelling & simulation work. I enjoy it alot because I have to use my knowledge of computers, physics and engineering. A few degree programs in modelling & simulation are starting to pop up around the country.
I work for a man who graduated from college with a bachlor's in Physics and Mathmatics. He is currently the Head Network Engineer. But he does have a ton of self taught knowledge in the computer field. Not to mention various other computer qualification certificates.
I just goes to show you that it's not impossible if you have your mind set to it. I think that it's scary putting so much money into the education for a career that you may change in your life time many times. So it's good to know that It isn't completly wasted if you have a fairly general major and not a BA in something obscure and un-marketable.
In 1995, I got a couple of temp jobs for a lousy wage (five quid an hour) doing basic data entry stuff. One job entailed moving Lotus 123 files into Excel: they turned out to contain macros, so I taught myself VBA from the manual and help files. Already knew about Linux and the Net from a kernel-compiling friend, and realised HTML was too simple to make a career out of; did some digging, and picked perl to learn over Java and tcl (which looked like the best bets for future net programming languages.) After a couple of years I'd tripled my salary and was learning as much as possible about networking and security - I thought the Net boom would bust fairly soon, and reckoned those would be good (and more importantly, interesting) areas to get into.
Alas I timed things wrong: employer went bust last summer leaving me stranded on the dole. I'm in the classic "can't get the fist info-sec job without prior experience" Catch-22.
Of course, five years of practice & experimentation on my home network, plus
getting as involved as possible in sec issues everywhere I worked, obsessively
reading Bugtraq, Incidents, SANS, CERT, nanog etc lists, Northcutt/Novak, Garfinkel/Simson, Cryptome, yadda yadda, doesn't count for much when their are MSc - qualified people with 5 years solid security work and a CISSP out there looking as well. [ Ob Begging: Gissa job, anyone? (London, UK.) ]
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
I majored in Classical Civilization (specializing in Latin and Rome) for my BA with the intention of going into publishing. After a year at a major talent/literary agency, I realized that I was in the wrong industry. I had no official computer courses on my resume; I quit, took one, and got a job as a Software Engineer at a large Aerospace company. They paid for my MS in Comp Sci.
The point is that you should study what you love. Learning how to learn and how to synthesize disparate solutions into a single elegant answer or how to even approach a new problem is more valuable than learning a language or getting other easy-to-acquire technical skills. Save that for your spare time. If a company is convinced that you can intelligently solve problems, the fact that you have a Physics degree rather than a Comp Sci should not matter. Just remember that the important things to learn in Computer Science is the theory, which you can usually learn through books. Don't let anyone tell you that you have to learn specific languages or programs; those are tools, not skills.
Russell Ahrens
just a heads-up: the expression is "in like Flynn". As in Errol Flynn. You can google for the origin. ;)
A guy who started at the same time I started my job majored in something business related and minored in Spanish. He's now our main web developer for everything related to our international (mostly Central/South American & the Carribean) business.
He came to the company with HTML and JavaScript knowledge, focused on the stuff his major was in, and picked up what he needed to do more development.
So where am I now? What was I debating? And what's the point of this message?
My potential fields of study were all over the place:
Coming out of high school, I decided that meteorology wasn't something I could pursue. At the time, I was foolish enough to believe that my field of study determined my career. As such, I applied to several CS programs and one very young Arts program that sounded interesting: Media, Information, & Technoculture.
I was accepted into all of my choices and then I had to make a real decision. At this point, I'd decided that a math-intensive CS degree wasn't where I wanted to go. I was apprehensive of the Arts program, but I thought I'd give it a shot. Before I could go, I needed a break. I deferred my acceptance for a year and enrolled in an MCSE course. I won't go into the details, but if you want to get an MCSE - buy the books, read them, and write the tests. Anyone with half a brain can get these damn things (and I can see the replies now - "you're proof eh?" funny..) Regardless, the year off was the best thing I could have done. I worked 20-30 hours a week and had all the time I didn't have in high school to tinker with technology and read.
When June rolled around, I was chomping at the bit to get back to school. I was completely refreshed and I'd distanced myself from high school. The distance from high school has done nothing but help me, because university is a totally different world from high school. The study methods you used in high school won't help you here. By this time I was extremely interested in literature, film, philosophy and techology. I researched the arts degree a bit more and made a gamble.
I've never been happier. My program is an eclectic mix of all my interests. I've also decided to combine honours with Philosophy. While all of this is happening, I have a sweet job working for the university's technology services department.
The point of all this? If you're more interested in the implications of technology than alogrithms, go for an Arts degree. In your free time, tinker with code. It's an excellent combination. I recommend it to anyone.
Before I end, a shameless plug for my program. The University of Western Ontario: Media, Information & Technoculture.
List of MIT courses - http://www.registrar.uwo.ca/ACCALS/2002/sec_2914.
MIT Degree Information -http://www.registrar.uwo.ca/ACCALS/2002/sec_1176
MIT Student's Council - http://www.usc.uwo.ca/mit/
Faculty Homepage - http://www.fims.uwo.ca/
Roughly, your education is what you study. The work you're paid to do you get to do by convincing someone you can do it (and then continuing to be able to do it) - it can have little to do with your degree or what you spent time studying. The fact that your field of study has little to do with what you might find yourself working on later is difficult for students to envision. Most haven't worked full-time for any length of time before. Counselors and curriculum planners leave you feeling that all these educational paths are really there to take you somewhere specific. Not!
It's very important to get a degree, any degree, but if your degree is in CS or Math or Heuristics or even (something non technical like) music it will mean little difference to someone who hires you to build a network, create an application, or run a server farm.
The biggest correlations between field-of-study and job lie in academics and professions like law and medicine and other obvious routes that have defined academic prereqs.
My advice: study what you enjoy studying and get any degree(s) until it's no longer fun. When it's time to find work look for something you feel is fun to work on. If the two don't match you'll figure out how to make it happen, because it's fun and you want to.
Simplistic, but true. But Whaddo I know?
Enjoy.
DB
Sometimes it even impresses women at parties who have had too much to drink.
... you're a geek
Way to much to drink, I would think
Make sure you heavily examine the institute of higher learning that you are considering pursuing your degree at.
I say this because so many schools have crap computer science degrees. For the most part, a computer science degree is horribly useless, because it's too general to teach you much of use. Instead of filling up your time with useless electives like history, higher level physics, cal3 and discrete math, foreign languages, they should spend more time teaching you about computers themselves. But more than that, I think teaching institutions should have somewhat specialized degrees (and no, I don't mean specialized to the point that it would just be equal to graduate school) in the computer field, such as a gaming programming degree (for those who want to code games, and will need physics and maybe some anatomy or biology for the characters), a networking computers degree (for sysadmining, setting up ISPs, stuff like that), and a business software programming degree (for people who want to code programs like anything GNU programmers do, text editing, image editors, big business junk), and then maybe a web coding degree (for either web designers, or people to run web based software applications, who need light languages, etc). And just get rid of the too-generic-to-be-worthy Computer Science degree.
Not that my idea is perfectly thought out, but instead of trying to pretend like computers can be lumped into one big category and that you can learn what you need to learn about them to do what you want to do with only one degree, institutes need to recognize that computers are multi-faceted and they need to let the rest of us know that they realize this.
Personally, I got to the point that I hate computers for the most part (well, except my own personal use; I'm tired of working on them at work and might get a new job), especially programming, since my school only teaches Java, and I prefer C++. So, I'm switching to graphic design, my other love. My first love.
Insert mind here.
since i was (i'm told) 2.5 years old, i had intended to be a surgeon. when i got to university i learned that the med schools want high marks above all, so one should take physics for poets. i looked at that, shuddered, and took physics for physicists, and other good, interesting courses. the med schools also wanted applicants to be working towards a degree. (i suppose they got tired of all the rejected pre-med students piling up at their doors with nowhere to go.)
so, after my first med-school application was soundly ignored, i moved from undirected general sciences to a computer science specialty, since that was an easy change and computers were fun. and i still took physics and biology and astronomy and whatever else whan fun too.
i am perfectly happy with the result (working as a software designer in various fields). med school is tough going and i am a lazy student. and when i make a fatal mistake with a computer i just push the reset button and try again.
Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler. -- A.E.
I have an undergrad degree in Mathematics (with a minor in voice), a PhD in Mathematics, four years of post-doctoral work in neuropsychology. I, too, found that pursuing a professorship was a dicey proposition. I write code for a living.
I don't use my degrees, although the thinking skills are really useful. After all, writing sound code consists largely of asking "What could go wrong here, and what's the least restriction I can put on my code that will prevent it?" That's essentially the same skill that one uses in proving a theorem. It reduces your error count a lot, and time spent not fixing errors in thinking is time spent improving the feature set.
So major in math -- it's infinitely geeky, you can dress as strangely as you like, and it's loads of fun.
Same situation as you. It sucks. I don't know which way to go.
God, Root, Whats the difference?
Its pretty damn simple:
1. Learn to write in a clear and concise manner. I studied print journalism and it has paid huge dividends.
2. Take a few good speech communication classes. Being able to speak in a clear, confident manner is increadibly important.
3. Learn how to make a clear, concise and *logical* argument. Try some classes on rhetoric.
4. If you plan to work in IT, take some classes in interface design or HCI (human-computer interaction). Most programmers/software developers suck at this. This will help you stand out.
5. Perhaps most cynically, my advanced degree trumps your certification/years of experience/etc. most every time regardless of what the degree is in.
Essentially, if you can write well, speak well, and think well, you can get a job in just about any career field. Simply having an advanced degree will get you farther than most anything else you can have.
I have worked as a computer security consultant for the last 8 years. I have a B.A. in Communications, and an M.Ed. in Educational Technology.
"Doctor's mistakes you bury, Engineer's mistakes you live with forever."
A former boss of mine was an Ornamental Horticulturist before he became interested in computers. He designed golf courses!
Many people ended up programming based on these forces. When there is a scarcity, employers tend not to care much about your degree (the recent dot-boom was an extreme example of this phenomena). But inversely, the number of jobs for physics majors per se has always been far less than the number of people competing for them.
Mathematically, it's the Pigeonhole Principle. Small numbers of jobs and large numbers of people chasing them lead to many people not getting the jobs. So they go elsewhere by necessity. It's that simple. See what a math education gets you ...
Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)
is that I entered college intending to major in Physics. I had the test scores, prep courses, and grades, and was granted a full four-year scholarship at a prestigious College.
Then they screwed up. I was lumped into an "experimental" program that rushed a bunch of us through first year Physics in the first semester, first year Chemistry in the second semester, all in Freshman year. Six months later, few of us could recall much Physics. It didn't help that the Math Department used a different symbology from the Science Departments, either. Long story short, I told them where they could stick their rushed Sciences program (the faculty there had decided that this wholesale abuse of students was the proper response to Russia's Sputnik - after discussing the matter for about ten years). But I still had them on the hook for the full four-year scholarship.
I graduated in Philosophy after _finally_ writing the thesis that this particular school required of all Bachelors candidates. Along the way, I played some poker and some pool (I'm still almost good), hit some decent parties with a few stunning women (my friends didn't know how I managed that), used and lightly dealt drugs among friends, rode a nice motorcycle, traded roommates to share a dorm room with my girlfriend, read and wrote about Plato, Aristotle, Hegel, Kant, Marx, etc.; that was a great time.
[To all you young guys in college now: while it's a different era, be really good to the first girls you date at school, I mean _very_ nice, if you get the chance and get my drift. At my college, the ladies restroom in the Library had two lists on the wall: a Green List, and a Black List. I got on the Green List, so I met lots of women while I was there.]
The school had an IBM 1401 computer with a Fortran compiler. The Physics Department was still trying to figure out how to use it for anything instructional. As I recall, they assigned us to calculate a pendulum equation, in Fortran, using punch cards, not realizing that the trig and log functions had been broken by Seniors before graduation. It was also understood that most guys would end up working in the Defense establishment, but I wasn't very enthusiastic about building bombs, no matter what the salary.
Summer before my Senior year, I got a job mounting tapes for a local service bureau on second shift. They had a Honeywell 200, 4' high X 4' wide X 20' long, 32K magnetic core memory, a card-reader and an optical-tape reader for input, 5 X 1600 bpi tape drives, no disk drives whatsoever, but a line printer. Well, I learned how to program it, hacked a datecard loading routine in H200 Assembly language, plus logic to ensure that multiple updates of the master tapes always ran in the proper sequence, built them machines for reviewing their optical tape files, supervised operators, learned COBOL, extended their specialized accounting applications, gambled to drop my student draft deferment only to draw a high lottery number, and watched billions of dollars flow from the CIA to Air America through a regional airplane leasing/services firm (whose small town accountant we happened to serve) while being thankful that I wasn't in uniform or otherwise anywhere near places where people were shooting at Americans.
My former Economics professor offered me the job as Director of my alma mater's Computing Center. I told him thanks, but no, battered about a little, got a job programming COBOL, taught myself IBM S/360 Assembly Language, got promoted to Systems Programmer, rolled out a statewide financial network, etc., etc. After several interesting jobs later, I've spent the last 15 years consulting for IT VPs, CTOs, and CIOs.
Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but I believe that all you have are your values, honor, and personal integrity. Let them guide your career choices, and you will always walk tall.
I started out in the arts, taking creative writing classes. Then I switched to dance school, and was taking cooking classes on the side. On a trip to Iran in 96, I was caught up in legal issues, and could not leave the country. Then due to details I cannot mention, I got involved with the US government, and was "brought into the fold". I was then trained in explosives, and firearms, and the subtle trade of espionage. I'm not proud of my current work, but I keep america safe. I try still do dabble in arts in my spare time. It is a calm center in a chaotic world.
I started University intent on a career in Molecular Biology, I thought Genetics and all that shit was cool, but now I lost interest and am thinking about computer science...
Here is my insight. I am currently working for a Research University providing computing support for a High Energy Physics group, A group doing Protein Crystal analysis and a group doing Synclotron X ray instrumentation and research.
;)
Now, I am not a physicist or biologist, just a computer geek, but my outsider's perspective is that at the high end, biology, physics, most of the hard sciences, start converging.
The X-ray folks (physics) and the Protien Crystalization (Biology) folk both use the same beam line to do their work. They are both using LOTS of Unix and Linux boxes to control and analyze the data and machinery. The "strict" biology group just bought 2 beowulf clusters to do cell membrane simulations.
What this comes down to is that you don't have to think "I'm going to do biology, or I'm going to be a Physicist" and think that is all you will be doing. Careers in the sciences have MANY different aspect that different people need to fill.
Another example- In the generic catagory of "high energy physics" you will see all of these activities with people changing hats on demand.
Designing particle acelerators, Building devices to acclerate and register particle interatctions, calcluating the results, running simulations, designing circuit boards, designing computing infrastructure, coding custom software, developing database systems, creating new data storing techniques for multi-terabyte data sets, designing hardware, doing equipment purchasing, developing the first web server (Cern HTTPD).
Now, the caveat. If you want to go this route, be prepared for the long haul in your education. You don't get to do most of this stuff until you are at least working on you Doctorate as a Phd student or afterwards as a postdoc.
If you really enjoy learning and playing with really cool scientific/computing toys, then the sciences are a great place to be. If you are going into computers because your good at it, and want to make the big bucks... well engineering, MIS, CS, these are all much more likely to get you a 9-5 corp job... nobody goes into academia to get rich.
Good luck and best wishes from a guy with a Comparative Religion/Psych degree who's job title is Linux Sys Admin
I've got a BS and an MA in Economics. I was working on my PhD in 1997 when I started working for a web services firm as a programmer. As I continued to be promoted and work more hours I realized I was having more fun working with technology than writing my dissertation, so I quit school and started working full time.
In fact, many of the people that I managed came from non-technical educational backgrounds. My Director of Development was a Music major and my help desk manager studied PoliSci.
That being said, there are many HR people (and managers) who use specific degrees to thin the field on candidates. This is especially true these days. Despite the fact that I was the CTO of a 65-person company and managed a group of 18 people I still sometimes have people balk at interviewing me because I don't have a BS in CS or EE. Many HR folks (the weak ones) view the posted job requirements as a checklist that needs to be ticked off to qualify for an interview.
My best advice is to pursue the degree and career that you think will bring you joy. There is nothing worse than sloshing through 4 years (or worse, 10!) of school doing something that you decide you don't love it. Don't pursue a career becuase it seems lucrative. If you do find that you want to do something that follows a different path than your education, keep looking until you find an HR person/manager/company that will look past the words on your degree and decide based upon your character, intelligence, and adaptability whether you'd be an asset.
I work as a senior engineer for a major ASP, although my college work was as a music major. My *hobby* was computers, and my interest in following technology advances, and my personal drive to understand how best to utilize it lead step by step to my current career path. I've discovered here that I'm not unusual at all, that the achievers are generally the ones who stumbled into a consuming interest, and who were lucky enough to realize that their hobby/ interest could also be a well-paid position. I'm not against formal training for a discipline, some of my strongest co-workers came right through that channel. I'm just observing that the folks who guess their passion the first try seem few in my workplace.
Why can't a person mix-and-match? People change careers often anyhow when they get into the real world.
Why don't schools let one get a degree in say electrical engineering, computer sci, and psychology. True, you may not get deep into any one of them, but that is better than getting deep into something you may never use and never touching in school what you do use.
Get Modern, you school beaurocrats!
Table-ized A.I.
You're major is important, but it is also important what other skills you pick up. A language is always a good one, especially in the US, as many people don't speak more than english.
I tried to be as general as I could, so I'm getting a degree in physics, a minor in music, and a minor in Law. I figure that gives me lots of flexibility in three areas I enjoy.
I learned the hard way. If you are not for sure, this is my advice. Do NOT get a degree in the field you wish to work (major that is), unless its required, like medicine. Say you want to work in computing (and not the research end), MIS/IT/IS/etc. Liberal arts will show that you can read and write and think for yourself. From there, get a minor say in CS, but actually even better, MIS/DSIS/some IT-type minor or AA. This shows you know tech. From there, to prove you have the abilities and interest in a certain aspect of tech, say MSCE for M$ enviro, CISSP for InfoSec, Oracle/Solaris certs for database admin...shows your capable there. (Don't let the /. crowd paint you into the unix box only.) I have a history major, minors in computer science and telecommunications, and working towards my MSCE and CISSP. Experience helps, but if your taking the 4 year route and don't have lots of times to work, you can do the major/minor paid easy and do the cert in the summer. Also, if you can, study abroad, it will help you *very* much (well if you go somewhere relevant to the position your applying for). Hope that helps.
Let me give you a run down of where Im at. Im a senior majoring in Computer Science and Physics at the University of Alabama. I got into research within The Center for Materials for Information Technonology and Im loving it. So where will I go next? Intern at Bell South doing security analysis of course. But in the long run I can not avoid my thirst for knowledge. I will end up in grad school certainly. Right now it looks like I'll get a Masters of Electrical Engineering and move on to a PHD in something. All the while of course making 20+ and tuition and fees. ;-) Just keep your eyes open to further education because the real world is not an easy place to survive.
I guess you could say I've taken a pretty non-traditional career route. I hated high school with a passion and had no desire to go to college, so within a month of graduation I joined the Army spent the next four years as a paratrooper in the 82d Airborne Division.
I didn't exactly enjoy the Army, however I did excel at my duties, and had a priviledged place in my company's command as I was the only person who had a computer (Atart ST). They made me the operations NCO, gave me my own office and a private room, and basically gave me whatever I wanted as long as I kept up the company roster, produced jump manifests, reports, etc.
Not being one who particularly likes bowing to authority however, I did my time and got out of the military. I applied, and was accepted to the University of Minnesota computer science program, however I guess I still wasn't ready to return to school, because an Army buddy called me up and told me to come out to California. Within a week everything I owned was in a U-haul trailer and headed to sunny California, where I spent a couple of years as a surf bum, getting high and hitting the waves. I also got a job working as a care provider in a group home for developmentally disabled adults. I spent about four years doing that, and moved up in the company to the position of assistant to the CEO, again largely because of my skill with computers.
During this time I took a few classes at the local community college, wandering around from major to major; marine biology, journalism, English Lit., etc. But nothing really intrigued me.
I then met the woman I was going to marry, and that really set me moving I guess. I started attending community college regularly to get enough transfer credits for the University of California. I also developed a strong interest in history, stemming largely from my years of playing games like D&D. I transferred to UC Santa Barbara (by this time I was not only married, but had a kid).
I majored in medieval history, and planned on getting a Ph.D. I also worked in the university microcomputer lab. As I was getting ready to graduate, I started thinking that a Ph.D. might not be the right thing for me at that point (my Ph.D. program would take ~11 years to complete - lots of languages). I started looking around, and almost on a lark I applied for a job with a large consulting firm. I figured I didn't have a chance, but they were impressed with my grades, and I kicked ass in the interviews, so they hired me. I figured it was a good choice to work there, as I'd make as much money there with a four year degree, as I would after spending 11 years getting a Ph.D. in history.
So I moved to Denver and spent the next four years shooting up the consulting ladder. Within a couple of years I transferred to the Seattle office of my firm, and was doing very well. Then Sept 11 happend. I got laid-off. Big shock. The job market, particularly in Seattle, stinks. I spent three months looking, with barely a nibble. So finally I said screw it, and opened my own computer consulting firm and landed a contract. Now I'm happier than I've ever been. I'm making great money, am my own boss, and doing something I enjoy.
So I guess the moral is, do what you want. I got one of the worst degrees there is in terms of earning potential, but it was what I was interested in. It was fun, and I would do it the same way again. My computer skills were such that I din't think I needed a CS degree, and it turns out I didn't. Do what you love. You'll be happier in the end.
-Vercingetorix
"Necessitas non habet legem." -St. Augustine
i've always been into computers, but had never really thought about it as a career. when i started university i was in biology with the intention of continuing into veterinary medicine. after a year of bio i was hating it and getting better grades in my non-bio classes, so after contemplating math, chemistry, and physics (or some combination), i went into the physics program. throughout my physics degree i took a bunch of math and computer science courses and got a minor in chemistry. by the time i'd finished that degree i knew that i wanted to use chemistry/physics in my career, but knew i didnt want to be an experimental physicist, so i spent a year taking more computer science and math courses to prepare myself for a more theory/computational direction. i then got into the scientific computation program at the university of minnesota. (semi outdated webpage here). great program with lots of different options from many different departments, so i was able to pick and choose exactly the courses that most interested me. i've loved the time i've spent here and strongly recommend this program to anyone with broad interests, but still geared towards science and computers. i'll be graduating at the end of the semester and look forward to putting what i've been doing to work.
Russ
What do the good know...except what the bad teach them in their excesses? - Clive Barker
Try to figure out what areas of interest you have, and which of those you think you would like to further. Next step, try to get a feel for which of those interests you would benefit most in having a university education versus other means (i.e. self-taught).
I entered University knowing that I could probably self-teach myself about what interested me the most: computer programming. Especially with access to the Internet, the resources available for that are just immense. So, I picked my next interest: electronics and communications. Hence, I ended up doing a degree in an area of interest, but one that I felt I could get the most value from only through a University education.
Today, I don't use much of the knowledge from my electronics degree, but the communications insight and, most importantly, the discipline etc. I picked up at University carry through to my career.
Oh... what do I do? Well, I work with computers building Intranet solutions for a telecommunications company. So... worked well in my case!
Fine Art student who fell into IT and programming. Programming is art!
Went in to UMass at Amherst pre-declared CompSci. Sophmore year I took a 3D Modelling & Animation class within the CS dept (no programming!), and stayed involved with the animation lab for the rest of my undergrad. I eventually went on to TA a character animation class as an undergrad, then co-instruct for a year after graduating.
:( while he was still teaching.
:)
In the mean time I had finished my degree in computer science with a healthy portion of traditional architecture, algorithms, networks, formal language theory, etc., an extra helping of math (one class short of double major - damn me for not taking field theory seriously!), and a dash of opengl and raytracer programming with Sandy Hill
So, armed with this multidisciplinary background, and the good word of my professors, I landed a job as a "character builder" (a job somewhere between AI programmer and programmatic animator).
On the job I made the mistake of exhibiting my artistic talent and have ended up doing 3D modelling and 2D artwork for the past 2 years. If thats not a convoluted path to follow for an artist, I don't know what is.
For the curious, my website is essentially the same as it was when I was job hunting.
This is not uncommon. I received my Bachelor of Engineering in Mechanical Engineering and practiced for a few years after graduating. I was miserable -- bored out of my mind. I had experience in a few programming languages and *NIX, so I applied for programming jobs. A telecom company gave me a chance in QA where I honed my skills while working. Now, I'm an embedded SE with a major defense contractor, happier and doing far better than I was as an ME. The college I went to only had the traditional four disciplines of engineering -- CivE, ChemE, ME, and EE -- but that didn't stop grads from finding and getting CS/CE jobs. Most were EEs, but some where from each of the other three. In fact, most said that their having a degree other than CS/CE got them a little more attention and made them more marketable. So, I say "go for it" to anyone wanting to make a change, even if you don't have a formal computer and/or engineering education. There are lots of employers willing to give you a chance if you market yourself hard enough.
When I started college, all I knew was that I wanted to do something with computers. As such, I went to Drexel University and started out as an Electrical and Computer Engineer. The real good thing about Drexel is the fact that they have a co-op program (other then that I don't know why else you would go there, but it is really hard to beat the co-op system they have). After going on my first co-op, I actually wound up working as a Unix Network and System Administrator, and I loved it. As I was killing myself in the engineering program (long story, but sufice it to say you get really screwed at Drexel as an engineer compaired to the other majors, quick hint, just for the calculus classes, engineers cover the same material in 3 semisters that all the other majors cover in 4 and we only get 3 credits per class while everyone else got 4, so we get 9 credits of calc that covers the same as 16 credits that every other major gets, this is pretty much the same for EVERY class you take as an engineer. I never had a singe class that was 1 hour of class time per week per credit, it usually worked out to 1.8 - 2.5 class hours per credit, hell I had a 3 credit class that had 9 hours of class a week!)
Anyway after that first co-op, I knew exactly what I wanted to do, and I didn't need to have an electrical and computer engineering degree to go do it. So I changed majors to Computer Science, since I already learned just about everything you get taught in the Information Sciences and Technology degree from actually working, I thought I might as well learn to write programs.
I got my bachelors and masters degrees in architecture (BSAS and MArch), and loved every single minute of the educational process that architecture puts you through.
The scope is incredible - there's the obvious art vs. engineering issues, but then there are quite a few things that pop up along the way - linguistics, artificial intelligence, computer science, music, history, theory, psychology, sociology...
And now I'm a systems analyst/developer - and I'm finding that analyzing, designing, and executing a software project has amazingly direct parallels to the same processes in architecture.
of course, the school you select is very important - a lot of them are much more strict and traditional and will let you take 2 electives then cram arch.history and HVAC systems down your throat the rest of the time.
just a thought anyhow. probably something better achieved through serendipity than through planning.
Do what you love. No if, and, but, maybe, or somehow. As corny as it sounds, do what nike says "just do it." Do what you love and no matter how rich or poor you are, you'll be happy. Everything else is only a distraction.
but a lack of using it. one of my relatives has his degree in theoretical physics. Once he graduated, he got a job as a computer programmer, and now is in charge of every datacenter in europe for zurich financial. me, i was thinking about computer science, but changed to physics when i realized how mindnumbingly repetitive comp sci is (but i do have a lot of respect for programmers, for doing what i am too lazy to do)
I'm a programmer.. along with several others, and our project leader is a marketing major with no computer programming experience, and above her is the IT dept manager, with a PHd in Psychology. Need I mention our company is going down the tubes?
In High School I spent many hours working in the computer lab. By the time I was a senior I was assistant teacher for the night time Adult Education classes in programming and computer use. By the time I went to college I had about enough of the computer industry, where I could be expected to pull down a healthy salary and sit in a little room all by myself for the rest of my natural life. Being the social sort I was having none of it.
I dropped out of college and went to work as a security guard while I was deciding what I would like to do. A few months later an internship at a local radio station fell into my lap. It was the most fun I had ever had at a job. It was surely what I would do for the rest of my life.
A couple years later and poor enough to not own a pot to pee in it was time for a big change. My roommate at the time was working for a small computer company that was badly in need of people that could breathe in and out repeatedly. Back again to the world of computers, which had changed dramatically since my High School days. You were actually expected to deal with the people who were using the computer to perform work.
From there I moved on to support a user base of around 4000 for a large, multi-national corporation. Eventually I moved up and up getting out from behind my desk occasionally. In my most recent position I was supporting fortune 100 companies for a large network monitoring company.
Looking back I sometimes wonder how I made it from there to here, but along the way the sidetracks that I have taken have only been to strengthen skills that I did not and could not learn directly in the IT field.
I hope my tale will help others who think it impossible to get work or be productive without a degree.
If Darwin was right, you'd be dead by now.
I started out wanting to major in Computer Science, but then I found DigiPen. Real Time Interactive Simulation all the way, baby!
The whole educational system is running into a lagtime problem; I COULDN'T have majored in what I am currently doing, because there WEREN'T any degrees in data mining 25 years ago.
How many of us are in the same situation? Working in fields that simply didn't exist when we first matriculated?
Everyone goes through this thought process when they start thinking about career paths. The best thing to do, is be as broad as possible.
I spent my undergrad years pursuing a double major Math and Physics, with a minor in CompSci. That gives me a broad footing in all technology fields, allowing me to go work as an engineer, programmer, teacher, etc. Currently I work doing research, mostly involving Math and CompSci, and am pursuing my MSc in Pure Math.
One thing I found very important is that skills gained outside of school are very important. If you have a higher education, but are a self-taught wizard at designing and piecing together custom electronics, then those skills are very employable, even though not formally attained.
In my personal experience, I have a friend with a pure BSc in physics whose first job was writing software for microcontrollers for a small company that made laser cutting machines. From there, he's now working in the research department at a network appliance company, helping to design network traffic control algorithms, a job heavy in CompSci and Math (same place I work).
By having a higher education, you show your ability to learn. As long as you can demonstrate good problem solving skills, and a broad base skill-set, you're good to go for most any job. If you specialize too much in university, you narrow your range outside of university.
Keep in mind, everyone will always defend their choices based on their perceived gains at the moment, but actually putting it in practice is another perspective. The best advice would be from people that HAVE majored in something "different" and HAVE gotten many interesting and "different" jobs around the country.
Note that going from ANY college degree to teaching high school, compared to getting the 4-year degree, usually isn't usually too difficult. It can be anything from nothing to merely requiring licensing to a Master's in teaching, but in either case it can be done in less than two years; besides, a Bachelor's can always substitute teach and in some states teach full-time.
The important thing is to major in whatever you are most interested, and would most want to do for the long haul. Although, you can certainly develop multilinguality without majoring in it if it's important to you.
There is an interesting point here to be able to work at multiple companies. You can have a broad skill (like a foreign language, business, IT, or HR) and work at a variety of companies, or you can have a more specialized skill (CS, EE, etc.), where you will get paid more, but there literally less companies to work for (although those same companies have more jobs for you, so it kind of balances out).
The point is, if you are really good at EE, Comp E, CS, Chemical Engineering, stuff like that, you have to be prepared to relocate to West Coast or other narrow regions of technology, or you have to hope that you can get a job at your local company and keep it for decades (and might get paid less). If you want to relocate, it's good because they are much more likely to help you pay for it. Teachers, business, etc. can work wherever they want in the country, although the pay and benefits aren't as good, but if you WANT to relocate, it will be much harder to get them to pay for it. Something to keep in mind.
Here in Brazil we have the solution for those who don't know exactly what to major in. We call Normal Course (Curso Normal in portuguese).
Here in Brazil high school is three years long, so we have to decide our carrer before 18. Many of us choose easier courses or even popular courses, exactly what shouldn't be done.
-=-=-=-=
I know life isn't fair, but why can't it ever be un-fair in MY favor!?
Call me crazy but where does happiness fall into? I try not to base life altering decisions on what has the most predicted market value. I go with what I love to do. Since i love to program so much i don't mind spending the majority of my time programming. The point is, how come no one has mentioned finding something that you like to do and following that path? If a particular path is boring, yet makes a good career move, does it make sense to follow it? No. Just trying to point out happiness.
I graduated college in 1995 with a degree in International Environmental Studies. IES prepares you for a career as a ... nobody. Even though the courses were interesting, I had almost no marketable skill coming out of college. Through a rigorous summer training course, I was able to get a health inspector's license, and ended up working for a local health dept. in NJ.
Now it is 1998, and I have no real future in the health inspection game; very little chance for promotion, and a crappy 30k/year salary. This is when a friend of mine rekindled an interest in computers and programming, and hooked me up with a job doing web dev at a local consulting company. A few years and countless hours of studying and toiling later, I have a successful career as a server-side developer at a e-commerce company.
With major's, I think it is important to think far ahead and not just about your current interests; I will forever be held back in an upper-level corporate IT environment without a more technical degree.
hawaiianshirt
I got a major in physics and just at the end "discovered" software and programming. I've been working at it ever since and have no regrets. One of the sharpest people I've worked with majored in anthropology, and another in English.
The fact is that you need to work hard, learn to learn, be both creative and curious. You want to foster those skills and attitudes, they pay off for you throughout life, and not just in the work environment.
While you are in college, you have the chance to follow some whims, too, and not get locked into the academic treadmill. I have a sceptical opinion of Computer Science degrees. Like many tracked programs, they are sending people into more academic work with the goal of college professor. If that is what you want, fine, but if you want to work in industry, just get a good grounding in science. Oh yes, learn some written and verbal communication. Yes, English (yuk). Everyone in the computer business needs to communicate. I find that the schools have given up completely on this critical subject.
Again, learning to learn is critical. Just 2 years ago I couldn't spell XML, but now I work with it all day. If you can't learn and master new subjects, you are missing out. Part of the "training" you get in college is to be flexible and learn new things.
I'm not sure why you regard such a career track as "non-traditional". It is in fact part of a more general tradition -- a tradition of people who are educated as generalists confronting the economic reality that when they work in the real world, while they may indeed draw upon the skills they acquired in their education, the actual work they do will be very different.
I got a BS in Geography and even work for a few years as a Park Ranger. Now I am a Network Admin. I believe the degree itself is not the most important factor. It's that you learn to learn. That is a skill that can serve you in everything you do.
I went to college for all of 9 months, taking a few classes in AutoCAD and failing most of them. While I was doing this, I was working as a draftsman at an home design business.
Right now, I'm in training to become a Structural Engineer (which is somewhat connected to draftsman, but typically requires graduating college) and, in addition, I am the company draftsman, a backup clerical worker (I "covered" doing the front office work for 6 months), I run the (small) company network and I'm writing a webpage (slowly).
Unusual for a 21-yr old college dropout with a GED... at least, it is around here.
Sounds like most people have jumped out of some career paths because IT/software/web was easier and more lucrative. Of course, if you *did* pursue that career in Underwater Basket Weaving, you probably wouldn't be posting on slashdot... I have a BA in Mathematics... and Music. Did software engineering for most of college... even about half a year after. Then decided there were better things to do... Music actually does work as a career, believe it or not. Business sense, the ability to work with people, and some good ol' fashioned work...
Take a look at the people who built your favorite desktop: lots of Ph.D.'s and masters in a lot of different subjects, but not many of them studied computers. Food for thought...
Has anyone checked to see how many CSC or ECE professors have a Ph.D in their field? Two of the CSC professors in my school actually have a degree in Computer Science. The rest are either Math or Physics majors. Actually, I had a CSC professor for 202 last semester who's PhD was in Physics and he was an awesome teacher. The fact is that very few people actually continue to get a PhD in CSC. I think the year before last, about 50 people graduated in the world. Since CSC is so related to math and actually grew out of math, many CSC professors today are simply math professors who got interested in the machines back then. "What does this have to do with the topic," you say? I just find it interesting how so many people who started in totally different fields became CS professors, and the fact they are actually good at it! It might give hope to some of you who all ready have higher education and want to teach somewhere in a field you're not specalized in. SumDog
I know a lot of people get knocked for just getting a technical degree, but it's a very good way to start for some people. I got started a little late on the higher education track. When I was 25 I got sick of drifting from one no-future job to another. I didn't want to end up delivering pizza for the rest of my life so I decided to get my ass in gear and go to school to study electronics, something I had always been interested in. I went to Devry and completed the associates degree program for electronic technicians because it was took a little less than two years. My plan was to get my foot in the door at a good company that would pay for part of the cost for me to continue on to Devry's BSEET. A few months before I graduated I got a job with one of the telecoms (one that survived the .com crash) as an equipment installer. Since I was well versed in electronics in general I was able to become familiar with a lot of the hardware, I moved from a field installer to coordinating equipment purchasing and logistics of storing and shipping the stuff to the field because the people that were doing that didn't always know what to send and when to send it. After more than a year of doing that, a head-hunter offered me a program manager job at another company. When I tried to turn in my notice at my company, they wanted to know what it would take to keep me. I told them that I wanted to get into engineering, thinking that they might offer to pay for me to go back to school. Instead they promoted me to an entry level engineering position and trained me on the job. This has worked out pretty well so far. I'm now 32 and if I do go back to school it will be to learn how to write code since the money seems to be in software. The telecom job market is scary right now. If I get laid off this year (very likely) at least I'll be able to fix TV's or something like that. Now I'm a little nervous about getting into another field at 32 when most of the entry level jobs for programmers are filled by people in their early 20's. God I'm too young to feel this old!
having just fallen off the turnip truck. Have fun trying to do all of that because it does not sound fun. Here at the University of Michigan the engineering department has a five year program but you must keep a 3.5 gpa by your junior year. let me tell you michigan is one of the best engineering colleges in the country, we have some of the smartest minds from around the world, and many people are unable to get their BSE in 4 years. It takes a lot of people 5 years, these are people with AP credits to begin with and who are taking classes in the summer. So unless you are like some people I have met with their perfect scores on the SAT and 50 college credits when they enter, you will not be able to cover all the necessary work in 5 years. I think 5 years for two degrees in seemingly unrelated fields is rather difficult. It seems to me what you are qualified for after this kind of program is a business position requiring minimal engineering skills
started as cs major, was hired to do computer security, three years later working at computer security firm while taking classes to complete history major ;)
I majored in English, intending to become a middle school English teacher. I went through student teaching and everything. Although, all through college, I did part-time clerical work for a small software developer. You haven't heard of them. Trust me. My mentor while I was student teaching was really into using technology in the curriculum (this was 1995, so not a whole of folks were doing anything with computers in the classroom), and my computer background helped with that a lot.
Anyway, the market for teachers in South Central Pennsylvania the year I graduated was atrocious. It was something like 80 applicants for every opening. But I still needed to eat and pay my rent, so I took a job as an instructional aide in an elementary school computer lab in 1997 (after trying to make it by subbing for two years). The pay was low, but it was the best job I ever had. Plus, I was "the recess guy" every day at lunch time, and that was actually a blast.
I spent a lot of extra time at the school helping out the district technology coordinator, so he wouldn't have to spent so much time at the building where I worked. He appreciated the help, and wound up recommending me for a tech job at another school district. So I went there and effectively tripled my income overnight. Then another district showed interest, and I switched again. (Another district showed interest in me after that, but I stayed put; I didn't want to get a reputation as a whore.)
So now I'm Assistant Director of Technology for a mid-sized school district. It's a great way to combine my computer background and my teaching background.
TheRhino
When I graduated from high school in '96, I *knew* I was going to be a physicist.
That lasted three weeks. Tops.
Suddenly I knew I wanted to do computer design in a big way. I wanted more than anything to created 3d special effects - primarily animation - for the movies. But what to do about college? Well, I decided that I could handle the artistic and technical side by myself, what I really needed was grounding in cinema. Cinematography, editing, lighting, etc. So, I switched from a physics major to a cinema/media studies major -- with which I graduated in 2000.
But that's not the end. About a year and a half before I graduated, I got fed up with my campus job (doing tech support for a university business group) and decided to look for a real job -- off campus. But what?
See, the 3d design eventually led to me working some in photoshop, and I loved photoshop. I knew I couldn't get a job doing 3d at my current experience level, but anything with photoshop would be terrific. And then it occured to me -- I could make web pages! I got my first job by lying about being able to write HTML, and showing my 3d work as 'design'.
This job occupied more and more of my time, and eventually I knew that there was no longer a future in the movies for me -- I was too hooked on the net. But it was too late to change my major again.
Eventually my web design led to Flash animation, which suddenly hit home for me. It combined computer-based design, my first love, with animation, my second love, and web design, my third love. It also encapsulates scripting, which is my newest love.
And suddenly my degree in Cinema/Media Studies from the University of Chicago WASN'T A WASTE! I was able to focus my education in cinema, and adapt it to flash animations. The result is, I get comments all the time, that my animations play more like movies.
The moral of the story is, do what you love. If you love more than one thing -- figure out a way to combine them. If you become unhappy with it, don't be afraid to evolve, but keep your past because you can always learn from it.
Punctanym: alternate spelling of words using punctuation or numerals in place of some or all of its letters; see 'leet'
Why bother paying all those fee's only to learn a bunch of stuff your probably never going to use. I have been a developer, sys admin and now a computer security guy with no formal schooling. I didn't even start working with computers, I started out working professionally as a paramedic.
I'm probably an archetypal example of a technology enthusiast who couldn't decide between electrical engineering and computer science. I chose to go with electrical engineering because I have always found it easier to teach myself software than to teach myself hardware, so a formal education in hardware would be a Good Thing[tm].
After graduating with a BS in Electrical Engineering, I decided to go to work writing code. I found it very easy to get interviews with software companies, despite being formally educated primarily in hardware, because of the numerous spare time software projects I had on my resume (it pays to be a geek even after hours). And once in the interview, I found it very easy to show that I know how to code.
It seems to me that in most high technology jobs, you can't really go wrong with any high-tech degree. It takes a little work to overcome stereotypes that companies place on you because of your training, but it can be done. Especially if you can demonstrate a passion and aptitude for what you want to do by taking on spare time projects that align with what you want to get paid to do.
That's a quote from Mark Twain, a smart man.
School gives you a piece of paper, and maybe some education, but it doesn't determine who you will be or what you'll do.
I started off majoring in chemistry back in '87. I started programming in about '79. I was a really good programmer. Chemistry was something I got interested in after a poor year of chemistry in high school and studying organic chemistry during my summer break and really loving it.
What I learned is that what interests me is not necessarily what I should study. I dropped out for a year, then went back as a computer science major and eventually dropped out and got a job as a programmer.
The classes I look back on as providing me with the best education, were my chemistry and English classes. I was way ahead of my Comp. Sci. program. I wrote a Pascal compiler just so that I could pass out of the compiler class. I showed up to my assembly language class twice. The first day and the final exam. I got an A+.
I'm not bragging, I'm just saying, school is one thing, education is another, and your choice of profession yet another.
I'm lucky, I can make a good living in my chosen profession. It's something I love to do and I'm good at it.
I'm 33 and my education is far from done. I learned a long time ago that I learn better on my own. Since then, I've studied physics, languages, chemistry, medicine, law, you name it, I've stuck my nose into most of it. I'm not a genius, and I'm not as good at any of these as I am at programming, but this is my education. School didn't educate me, except to let me know that I learn better without it (save the English and Chem classes).
Study what makes you happy. Then get a job that makes you happy, in whatever field. Take it from me: Making good money at a shitty job sucks, and making mediocre money at something you love is awesome. That's the only thing you should consider. Consider school 4 years of a chance to learn things you don't know anything about and to learn more about the things you want to know. When it comes to getting a job, go after what you want to do. Forget about which profession will make you the most money (unless that's what makes you happy).
Do what you want, not what others would suggest you do.
When I first started college, I was a CS major. Orginally I was going part-time, and working full time at a local computer company, doing anything from building point-of-sales systems to writing software.
:-) But that's what I did. Where the previous teacher was just basicly teaching typing, I was teaching them about how computers actually worked, how to use the internet, etc. Even had a group of 8th graders who worked on the school website. I even got into some basic prgramming later in the year using the C compiler for the Gameboy. Hello World on a PC isn't too interesting to a 8th grader. Do the same program, and put it to a GB Flashcart and have it run on their gameboy, that's something cool.
:-) Of course, people in the CS dept. kinda chuckle when I say I'm going into education because they think I'm not going to pass up a $60k/year job to go to school for another year to make $30k/year. But it's never about the money, about doing what you like to do.
When I left(long story) I was informed of a part-time teachine position at a local elementry school. It was a private school, so I didn't need to have my certifications, and a CS major at the university was what they were looking for. I loved it. Learning about the differnt educational packages, how kids used computers, teaching them all I knew, etc. Nothing quite as exciting/nerveracking as having a class of 3rd graders assembling your new dual celeron system
Well, I transfered schools(Attending the University of Pittsburgh) I decided to go into Education. How Pitt's education program works is I'm still majoring in Computer Science, but taking courses that will get me into the School of Education when I graduate. So in 3 years, I'll have a BS in CS and a Masters of Education.
I figure I won't have any problems finding a teaching position holding a CS degree. And I can get into things like developing quality educational software. Or even work for Apple
You've got excellent hands-on experience managing a warehouse, along with a CS degree that indicates some smarts and an aptitude for math. There is a place for people like you in the area of logistics, operations research, and production planning.
Look into the American Production and Inventory Control Society and their certifications . These are well regarded in the field.
I would also reccomend this field for other burned out CS types. You have the advantage of working with real tangible goods and a very down-to-earth set of people.
If your children ever found out how lame you are, they'd murder you in your sleep
Having grown up in working class north Idaho, I never ever thought working in computers. It was just a very expensive hobby. There were probably only about ten people doing computers full time. I thought of electronics, which I also played around with, and I knew and EE, but it was also a rare thing. After high school, I just didn't do much of anything. Thought I'd go to school to be a psychologist. I got a helpful scholarship in music too. I ended up double majoring in Music Theory/Composition and Psychology. Advice: if you must double major, at least make sure it in related disciplines!!! At the end of college, the internet finally arrive. Suddenly, running a BBS was just lame. Suddenly, my hobby became very profitable. As it turns out, b/c I'd be doing this so long, I actually had more practicial knowledge than the computer types. Now, I'm stuck in it, but (when I'm employed) I really do enjoy it. I'll probably get a graduate degree in psych at some point, knowing now I can afford it. One note, I'm not a real CS person. I can program, but I wouldn't hire me to do that. I can network, dba and admin great. If it were my life plan to stay in this, I would go and get a CS degree and learn the math better and learn the theory.
Democrats and Republicans only disagree about how to enslave you
I too had quite a time trying to decide upon a course of study. I chose biology for my undergraduate degree, and even accomplished some successful research/got my name in a few publications... I was happy with the academic atmosphere.
Then for my graduate degree, I decided upon computer science. What an incredible mistake!!! I do not reccomend a small state university if you try this, because I never heard the end of how I could never be a "real" or "successful" computer scientist, no matter what my grades or accomplishments were. THIS CAME FROM THE FACULTY WHO WERE SUPPOSED TO BE MENTORING ME!
I worked at IBM for a bit, and now I believe them.
My exit evaluation? "Linux is a nice hobby, but real computer scientists use Windows. You really need to learn how to program for the Windows platform."
I think they were about as forward thinking as the professors I had.
Just for grins I think I will learn how to program for the Macintosh platform instead. X seems so much cooler because it is unixy.
Become a CPA or a lawyer. You will always find work, and have a resonably good career.
Trust me. Stability and comfort are much more pleasant than uncertainty. Study what interests you in your free time, but train for a career that is tangible.
Your major in college doesn't determine what job you will end up with, it determines what classes you will take. Therefore, major in an area with classes that you will enjoy. In my case, I enjoyed technical courses with stuff like math and electronics, so I majored in EE. At the same time, I had interests in literature, writing, and philosophy, but I didn't particularly like classes in those areas (some of the literature courses were quite interesting, but I absolutely hated the one philosophy course I took), so I pursued those as outside interests. I also enjoyed playing around with computers, but I had no interest in CS classes. The result was a resume with a pair of EE degrees, a good range of technical skills, and various activities well outside the realm of EE (school newspaper, writing tutor, etc.).
When it came time to look for a job, my coursework and project experience didn't point at any one specific job - I had enough skills and experience to get a job in a variety of areas like hardware design, telecommunications, systems engineering, software design, consulting, and probably many others. The company I work for now does a lot of systems engineering, but you'll have a hard time finding anyone with a systems engineering degree - as far as I know, that major does not exist (and if it does exist somewhere, it shouldn't). When you get a job, you will have specific tasks that will usually require you to draw on your experience in general and not specific coursework. You may find some details helpful, but most jobs aren't the same as any college class (I would suggest staying away from those that are, as they could lock you into a specific position with no room to move).
Remember, even within a single major, there are many paths that you can take, making even an EE or CS degree a bit ambiguous. What will ultimately matter will be your full range of skills, not the letters on a piece of paper (unless those letters are "MCSE" of course). What is important is to enjoy what you do and build skills in the areas you are interested in. When deciding which of your interests (assuming that your interest is equal in all cases) to make your major and which to make a minor or hobby, start with the ones that will give you the most flexibility in the future and match those to the positions that require the most rigid structure to provide the greatest reward. For me, an EE degree provided the best opportunities, so I majored in that and left the rest to hobbies and outside interests. You need to rank your interests similarly.
For example, if your interest is in becoming a computer security specialist, as in your example, an EE or CS (I would suggest EE, Master's if you can do it) degree with a concentration in communications/crypto/etc., a minor in physics, and system administration as a hobby would put you in the best position to get the specific job you want, while still giving you the necessary skills for jobs in many other areas. Going straight at a specific job area without other supporting skills or getting a degree in another area with just an interest in the job area will put you at a competitive disadvantage (especially with the recent change in the job market). If you change your mind later or find an opportunity in another area that is too good to pass up, the more flexible skill set will put you in the best position to succeed. It is always possible to do something like major in Chinese history and go on to design propulsion systems for NASA, but don't go convincing yourself that you can always get away with that just because someone else did. There are a lot of variables at work, so you need to do as much as possible to minimize their effect on you if you want to pull off a big career shift.
Duh... it happens all the time. Craploads of people go into fields that have nothing to do with their major. What else is there to say? What a ridiculous post and a ridulous waste of space.
Confucious say: "Is stuffy inside fortune cookie."
I, too, was an EE major in college because I really didn't know what I wanted to do "when I grew up". However, through a little luck and perserverence, transitioned into software development, with practically no college preparation (except the simplistic computer programming classes offered to me in my degree program). Whether good or bad, I spent a lot of my time in college doing "self study" in computer programming, which resulted in a lot of my EE school work suffering.
When it was all said and done, I had a solid background in the things that I wanted to learn and have been able to consistently grow in the software development arena. The degree in EE (or lack thereof) hasn't affected me in any positive way, and today when reviewing potential hires, I find college preparation to be one of the least important credentials on a resume. YMMV.
A quién quieres timar? Por mucho castellano que sepas no consigues un trabajo dónde te dé la gana.
Venga hombe, que no nacimos ayer.
Ni de coña consigues trabajo en el FBI, la CIA, Boeing, etc. simplemente por hablar castellano y sacarte un titulillo segundón.
A la inversa sí: si eres Ingeniero Telecomunicaciones, Ingeniero Informático, Ingeniero Aeronáutico o similar, y tienes un titulillo de castellano (o simplemente lo hablas bien) sí conseguirás un trabajo en lo que quieras.
Yo soy de España y las cosas funcionan así: primero tu carrera universitaria, luego tus idiomas. Cualquier ingeniero es capaz de apender otra lengua (o varias: yo hablo cuatro además del castellano), pero no al contrario, porque cualquier gilipollas aprende un idioma.
Choose a major you enjoy. Regardless of what you plan to do with your life(some form of Engineering: Problem solving-my suggestion). If you picked your major based on Salary, you're in the wrong major. $10 million/yr eating shit 40 hrs/week is worse than $50,000/yr doing what you love. Chances are you won't be exactly what your "major" is, but hey at least you had fun getting the degree. Life is not a formula.
me = Comp. Sci + Elect. Eng. + Math minor(comes free with the EE/CS; Math major+10cr)
MATH IS FUN!!
(Comp. Sci. is an art form....)
Every path goes somewhere...chances are you'll stop before you reach the end --Unknown
This was a joke !
"Grammer 210" !
Slashdot's crazy idea that majority of people must be right. Mainstreaim is conceptually wrong because mainstream is ignorant. Moderation flow on Slashdot is mainstram already, therefore it's bullshit.
Trolls have won.
My college roommate got a B.S. in Physics with minors in CS and math, and he went on to law school to study intellectual property/patent law. This has always struck me as a good way to put a physics degree to work without becoming a physicist and dealing with the requisite 5+ years of grad school getting a union card^]^]^]^]^]^]^]Ph.D.
Of course, with many subfields of physics having way more jobs than people to fill them, you might just opt to just stay in the more traditional physics tracks. Many of the national labs, e.g. LANL and LLNL, pay in the 90-100k+ range with nice benefits packages for entry-level Ph.D physicists, and they are aggressively trying to hire people. With the demographics of the labs as they are, they will likely continue being as aggressive in their hiring for another decade or so at least.
I majored in Journalism and spent so much time fixing the crappy Apple Talk NW that I ended up swtiching to Windows (sorry Linux just wasn't available in 1987) and NW the two so we wrote on Win and did Layout on the Mac.
Next thing I knew I was a Sys Admin with an English degree.
This
I graduated with an EE degree and landed a "real" job in the field working for a contract manufacturer as a circuit board test engineer.
After six months in the board plant, working for a manager who is possibly the most profane individual I have ever met in my life, an entry level developer opening popped up at a major telecom company located in my city. I jumped and never looked back.
I believe that there are good EE jobs out there, but I was miserable.
Here is my carear path to strangeness, Putting people on VR machines at 16 play testing computer games at 17 Got into TV Outside Broadcasting at 21 Sys Admin at a computer games company 23 Sys Admin at a radio Station 25 Sys Admin at a computer games company 26 Lost my job few months ago 8( Now (just to fill in time) I'm a Map (Monkey) Designer for a computer game that is going to be broadcast on Interactive TV, utilising *some* of my collected skills along the way. It's more interesting to learn lots of stuff, but frankly I have watched the people who focus on one thing, zoom by me on the way to riches. They have houses and cars and *eek* savings. I work late at work, just so they will by me a curry. Then again, I have had a wild life... TV slappers, Music industry chickys, cutting edge games and equipment, free drugs, free booze. And there is no possible way I can complain about that.
Computer Science is a fascinating discipline that provides us with a lot of important aspects of our technology-- but studying Computer Science does not prepare you for a job in the real world doing software engineering. I regularly interview people with master's degrees and doctorates in Computer Science who don't understand simple, practical basics about how software works and how to build it. I'm generally suspicious of any resume that has lots of CS on it, though I'm content if they can pass my interview questions.
The most important thing to have if you want a career in computers is experience, not education. I took a free course in C programming in the Unix environment at UC Berkeley when I was 15 and got a summer job doing programming when I was 16. If you can find yourself an internship or other opportunity, that's valuable. Take your college's CS track through Data Structures and Algorithms; you may never have to implement more than a doubly linked list yourself, but it's convenient to know "oh, I'll just use an STL map, that gives me a red-black tree" when you're writing code. Major in something that interests you; minor or double-major in CS if you wish, but don't let that stop you from taking English Literature or Philosophy or whatever catches your fascination. Real-world software engineering experience will trump book learning on those job offers that ask for CS degrees.
"Before enlightenment: sharpen claws, catch mice. After enlightenment: sharpen claws, catch mice."
[Full disclosure: I'm a professor at Penn State in one of the departments that you list.]
The most important skill to learn in college is how to think rigorously and creatively. From your brief description of interests, I'd also add analytically to the list. Any challenging technical or scientific job requires continuous learning after graduation- college is to learn how to learn.
My own bias (no prizes for guessing what department I'm in!) is physics: it's something of a liberal arts degree for the 21st century. Quite possibly an undergrad physics degree won't teach you any 'useful' facts :-),
but it will teach you how to analysis complex problems rigorously and analytically.
Same applies to the other majors you listed too, of course. You won't go wrong in any of them so long as you challenge yourself.
Curtains for windows?
How can you say physics is narrow? Its object of study ranges from microcosm to macrocosm, from elementary particles to galaxies (and beyond). Compared to physics any other science is limited and narrow.Physics could do very well without computers (Max Born, Pauli, Dirac, Enstein , for example did not use any computers) but there would not be any computers without physics. Think of any other major science and you will notice that they all rely heavily on physics. For example chemistry has very few laws of its own. The branch of chemistry which deals with the chemical laws is physical chemistry and physical chemistry is esssentialy physics. Think about modern biology which is based on genetics. Without physics and X-rey diffraction we would not know a thing about DNA structure. The future of computing is is quantum computing. If in the future there would be any quantum computers it is very likely that the main contributions will be done by physicists, not by computer scientists. Today most computers scientists know very little about quantum mechanics, they are just not qualified for the job!
I am putting two kids through college now and one
thing I keep repeating to them is that a Bachelor's
Degree in anything is nothing more than a license
to learn. All it says is that you have demonstrated
some ability to learn, and you may be trainable for
real life jobs. Although that may sound harsh it is
nothing but the truth. So you will inevitably end up
in a career college that does not fit your major. But
whatever you end up doing, college will have prepared
you to do it well (if you work at it) because,
presumably, you will have learned to think.
Don't worry too much about what you are majoring in.
Just make sure that you enjoy what you are doing,
and whatever it is do the homework first, fool around
later. You'll be OK! Enjoy it!!!
I am at Penn State now and majoring in computer engineering with the same issue. I just went to the Coop seminar today and learned of even more stuff I can do. They did point out that once your any type of engineer, your an engineer. Plain and simple. You just have a focus in EE for example. I am a computer engineer minoring in physics. I want to satelite systems or missle guidance and found this to be the right twist. The best you can do to find out you niche is to get EXPERIENCE. get as much as you can in anythign.. this wil help you find your way!
The company I work for, Gregory Consulting Ltd., was co-founded by a woman with a PhD in Chemical Engineering. She says she loved chem in high school but decided computers was her thing after uni. The engineering degree just gave her the problem-solving skills she needed to get by. It has been my experience that when you apply yourself enough, you can succeed in just about anything (unless you're a real idiot). Getting a degree that focuses on problem-solving techniques (aside: one of the better programmers I know was a philosophy major) always helps.
Went to college for Biology/Pre-Dental, with aspirations to be an oral surgeon (don't ask me why). Graduated 1995 w/ B.S. in Bio... directly into a full-time job as a CSR for a finance company. Then the Graphics guy got fired in '96, and I sat down in front of a Mac for the first time. In '97, based on my desktop publishing exper., I got my current job. Four years later, I fill six roles at work: Desktop Publisher, Marketing Coordinator, Webmaster, Sys. Admin., MIS Mgr. and just now getting into Python programming.
So, in my opinion, the non-traditional career path is the most fun, since you (and your employers) will recognize your adaptability, they'll throw more stuff at you to do, and you'll ultimately have the opportunity to do tons of different things.
"Jack-of-all-trades" isn't that bad a title, if you can do 'em all well. And you rarely get bored. Good luck.
-- What the hell was I thinking?
I just turned 60 and am "retired" here is my career "want-to-be" track.
KID: Fireman / Baseball Player -->
High School: Electrical Engineer -->
College: B.S in Engineering Science - EE not offered at my University (USAF Academy)-->
JET PILOT - USAF F4C "Phantom II" -->
MEDICAL DOCTOR -->
Family Practice Residency -->
USAF Flight Surgeon -->
Biomedical R&D "Advisor" in USAF Combat Casualty Care -->
Biomedical R&D Management -->
Vice Commander of a USAF Biomedical Human Factors R&D Lab -->
Various Tri-Service upper-level Staff Jobs -->
Retirement from USAF in 1994 -->
Biomedical / Crew Systems Consultant to USAF -->
Complete Retirement 2001.
I never dreamed any of this would happen when I was in High School. Like you, I was interested in Science and Technology and got interested Electronics via Ham Radio as a teen-ager. I wouldn't even consider the possibility of anything in Medicine in High School or in College in the early 1960's. But in retrospect, I wouldn't have had it any other way. All along I had fun, and it was quite exciting... even sometimes dangerous. I gradually became interested in other things and learned a bit about them as the "need" arose. Each "job" built upon my previous experiences and knowledge. At one time when I was flying, becoming a Test Pilot and/or Astronaut was a goal, but it didn't happen. My interest in Computers is a hobby, but was also a natural outgrowth of the various jobs and posititons I held along the way.
The best advice I can give to someone in your position is DON'T get hung up on the specific degree or Major. In the long run, it is just a measure of your capabilities and discipline to complete a given course of study. I never worked as an EE, but I sure used my Engineering problem-solving skills at every step! Pick something that you enjoy and are good at doing, then enjoy while you learn to THINK! That is what most potential employers value, IMHO.
Cheers,
-Don Spoon-
Believe it or not, anthropology was sort of a good preparation for programming. I spend a lot of time constructing good mental models of the problem, and usually end up with simple ways to tackle problems that seemed a lot more complicated. (I'd still recommend a C.S. degree instead, though.)
Plastics.
A few more words:
Actually, I think the best advice is to do what you think you'll do best at - which is often whatever you find the most interesting. I imagine you'll want to eventually do something that you can excel at and have a good time at. If you want to get there as fast as you can then try to figure out the best career match for your interests and strengths and work backwards to figure out the most applicable degree(s).
Don't worry too much about finding an exact match, as long as you push yourself to learn whatever you choose, develop so-called "transferable skills", and can demonstrate your potential (inside and outside of the classroom). If you excel in EE and then want to become a banker, remember that many future employers are going to think more highly of someone who's top of their class in engineering and active in outside activities, than someone who's middle of the pack in business or economics with no distinction inside or outside the classroom.
You CAN do just about anything starting from just about any background, but some paths are more direct than others so it depends how sure you are. If you have the time and want to develop broad skills then play around a bit in school, as well as learning whatever you can on your own. If you want the best job right out of school then choose what suits you best so you can learn most effectively and get the best marks.
That being said, you seem to have already narrowed it down to a few similar majors. Of them, EE probably gives you the most opportunity based on name alone, since engineering is generally more rigorous than CS and allows you to get a professional designation. For many jobs either degree will work if you have the right skills. As long as you're not bent on choosing a profession that specifically requires a particular degree (Meds, Law, Civil Eng.) then make your choice based on the specific courses you want to take since that's what you'll actually be learning, regardless of the program. For instance, engineers can often take many of the same courses as CS majors but not vice versa.
Good luck.
My next sig will be ready soon, but friends can beat the rush!
Great post! Nice tip about the girls, haha.
Rangers Lead the Way!
Do you mean a non-traditional career path like my uncle? He dropped out of grad school at Princeton in physics to drive a cab. Is that what you mean?
Like all good students I started off in college with a major I thought would get me a good job. Mechanical Engineering. However half way through calculous 2, when I took one look at the mid term exam my eyes glazed over and I started drooling. So the next day I dropped that class and changed my major to German. It finally dawned on me that I was paying a lot of money to torture myself, that's just stupid.
I've always enjoyed languages and cultures, so this made the rest of my college career far more enjoyable. Now before you discount my geekiness, I'm a Technical Specialist for a growing company specializing in disaster recovery. I've worked with big Unix boxen, 100+ node IBM SP's, and other IBM and Sun boxen. I'm going to have the opportunity to learn HP boxen as well.
I didn't jump from school into this spot, not with just a German degree. I worked in a small computer store as a bench tech, they were going out of business and their regular guys were finding other jobs. They needed cheap help, and I needed experience. Good match.
When they went out of business I got a job working phone support for Winblows. I did that for 3 years, one of the better techs in the company. I paid my dues there, did a good job and when the opportunity came to move to a Unix Admin team, they were desperate for help and I, having very little unix experience at the time, was very cheap to employ. I paid my dues there too, learned my trade fast and took advantage of all the training I could get my hands on. When the time came, I took my skills elsewhere and bumped my salary a good bit.
*Note to employers* Good employees can be found cheap if you're willing to train, but once they have the skills, if you don't compensate them they will take those skills elsewhere. I'm talking about working 300+ overtime hours in an under staffed department, earning a top review on my yearly and being told there was no money left for raises. In a fortune 500 company that was making money, go figure.
The moral of this story? Study what you like. Find out what you want to do with your life and then work hard to achieve it. Could I have gotten into the computer field a lot faster with a computer degree? Sure. But I would have enjoyed college a whole lot less and at the time I didn't even know what Unix was.
"The avalanch has already started, it is too late for the pebbles to vote." -Kosh
Chemical Engineering seemed to involve a lot of brilliant people doing very dull things, such as making plastic bottles (the purity of the plastic must meet some standard, volume can't vary by more than say a ml., etc.). These were not things I wanted to fuss over.
CS lets me use both sides of my brain; writing the kinds of programs I write is both creative and mathematical. I'm terrified of graduating and having to debug someone else's code in a basement. My current job (designing online courses and online components for research projects at a university) is not paying so well, but is very satisfying. The majority of what I do is not repetitive and requires creativity.
Now I'm
"Consider how lucky you are that life has been good to you so far. Alternatively, if life hasn't been good to you so far
I would say that around 30% of the Marine Corps Officer Corps could identify with this. Job choice for Officers has nothing to do with your past education and experience. I graduated from the Naval Academy with a degree in Engineering and also had 14 years of computer programming experience (started at 11) as well as a few industry certs in network admin.
The way jobs are picked is done as follows:
* Every one in your class at the Basic Officer Course lists their job preferences from 1 to 25 out of the 25 available fields.
* The class is then divided into thirds based on class standing.
* The number one person of each third gets their first available choice, then the number two person and so on down the line. So if you were the bottom of the top third, you could potentially be screwed unless no one above you wanted your first choice.
* Then all the different section heads sit down in a room and start shifting a few people around. (i.e. one person may have gotten their 5th choice and another their 10th. If person 1's 5th choice happened to be person 2's 2nd choice and the section heads feel strongly enough about person 2, they may give person 1 his 6th choice since once you're beyond the top 3 it usually doesn't matter anyways.)
My section head knew of my skills and my first choice was Communications and Information Technology. I ended up with my 4th choice which was Supply Management. On the bright side though, as soon as I got to my first command, they put me in charge of a computer programming section (that develops supply management software) and I've been happily coding web based apps ever since.
I've dirtied my hands writing poetry, for the sake of seduction; that is, for the sake of a useful cause. --Dostoevsky
Frankly, if you are technically minded, it probably doesn't matter what you major in within the Science or Engineering departments. It's more about just getting a degree. CS is a bit easier than CmpE or EE due to less math and no hard-core engineering classes. Whatever. Education doesn't stop after school. If you put your mind to it, you can do anything you like. Just get through school and move on.
When I started college fall of 1976, there was a group of four of us hanging out in the computer center. I was a Physic major, the others were Business, Psychology and I think it was Accounting. All of us got programming jobs when we graduated, though two of us had switched to Computer Science by then.
So I get my degree in computer engineering. I had hoped to go into embedded systems development of one sort or another. Prior to graduating, I did the career fair bit, talked with reps of the company I was most interested in working for, pass on the résumé. I get a call... about a design DBA position. Right.
Well, they hired me. Not because I knew Sybase (which I most certainly did not -- I'd never even touched logical database design in college!), but on the basis that I (theoretically) could pick up something new in a short amount of time. I wasn't going the pass up the opportunity. Besides, programming (even microcontrollers) could get old, at least for me. Heh.
Three years later, I'm a Sr. DBA handling both Sybase and Oracle, working to introduce the higher-ups to MySQL. It's been a weird, wild ride, but well worth it. The pay's certainly working out for me!
Use what talent you possess:
the woods would be very silent if no birds sang
except those that sang best.
Since science and technology is booming ...
If you think this is a boom, I shudder to think of what you would consider a bust.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
22 hours of class per week doesn't seem all that bad. I am in my second year of EE while I have 29 hours of class a week this year, i had 36 hours of class a week first year. 20 would have been lovely.
I got my bachelor's degree in Chemical Engineering. I never did get a job as a ChemE, but eventually found something as an Environmental Engineer doing ground and surface water sampling. When I wasn't out in the field, I was putting together reports and presentations in Excel. My boss noticed that I had a knack for doing that kind of stuff and encouraged me to pursue it more.
I eventually made my way back to college to pick my Master's in EE/CS.
I believe that it's easier to get into CS by non-traditionaly methods because the field is young and the culture is such that almost everything you need can be found on the net. With a little bit of interest and effort anyone can learn the syntax of a language and the incantations for compilation. However I don't think that just anyone can become a solid Computer Scientist without time spent in the classroom learning the stuff that makes your head hurt - algorithms and discrete math. Without that background, it would be very difficult to really progress as a developer.
I went from Philosophy (BA '93) straight into social work (five years working in the field, also a Masters in Social Work in '98) to Network administration. Just go where life takes you- and read Siddhartha by Herman Hesse.
-Legion
no.
I went through the Computer Science program at Kent State University in 5 years, but after three and learning about a business opportunity, I decided that I should finish my degree and focus more on becoming a businessman than a computer engineer. I do not regret my decision because what I have developed as a business will pay off for me big time in the long run.
In looking at these posts they seem rather traditional to me, you get to a certain age, go to school, get a job and make money. I went to school majored in Anthropology with a minor in CS. Met a great woman who is also a programmer. Got married and had kids. Seeing as she paid more in taxes than I made I stayed home with the little (ahem) joys while she continued to work for a major insurance company. With the cost of childcare in the N.E. it made a lot of sense. While most of the posters here concern themselves with programming machines, I have three little people to program (its usually called teaching and raising). And I tell you, if you want over worked and underpayed try being a homemaker.
Yeah, I got my first degree in 1984 doing microbiology/genetics. I used to work in DARPA's bio-warfare program for the fueher reagan. It was supposed to be a defense and found out we were doing weapons instead. So I was disillusioned with it and found out that Programming was fun. Went back for MSCS (only finished the BS part though) and have enjoyed coding ever since. One suggestion: consider getting a dual degree or get another degree later. while CS is interesting and fun, it is better combined with something else.
English major in College, now I'm in flight school...heh BA's are all the same anyway.
I graduated in 1998; very few of my friends graduated and went into their field of study, directly.
I studied studio art and art history; now I'm a self-taught network engineer at a major market data company. Art was not my intended major, and really found me; not the other way around. It was something I was good at and enjoyed.I consider my time at college a development of my creative mind, problem solving and organizational skills. When it comes down to it, the technology is secondary to being able to solve problems and communicate clearly.
This is all related to all this talk about the new economy; the new information age, and the mutability of professions and work. Related to this is the fact that what you actually do on the job is rarely something you can learn at school; unless its research related. The best example is how many universities' CS programs are still teaching outdated languages that you would never use nowadays. And very few schools teach networking, or other aspects of IT that are huge industries now, except within the context of a business program...
I have a BS in Astro, an MS (and soon mebbe) a PhD in High Energy Physics, I have done research at Fermilab, Missisippi, Michigan State, am a ficitional character in a SF novel, have taught astronomy labs, written the Astro lab manual and run the observatory at Mississippi, have been webmaster and system admin for the HEP group at Miss., have written thousands of lines of Fortran code, run my own website, and am currently the University Webmaster at Mississippi.
I have taken 2 undergrad computer courses (PL/1 and Fortran) at PSU...
And I have no clue what I am going to do when I grow up...
Eric Aitala
www.f1m.com
When I was a kid and teenager, I hated computers -- they were inflexible, boring, and involved too much typing. My mother worked with computers all day in a cubicle at DEC, and I swore I wouldn't grow up to be a cube-dweller, but rather would do something fun, outside, where I could see the weather coming and feel alive. Sometime in middle school, I decided I would fly airplanes. It became something of an obsession.
I got my private pilot rating in high school, then went to college for aviation. I graduated with a MS in Aviation Management/Flight Technology and got most of the other available fixed-wing ratings in the process. Then I worked for 2 years as a flight instructor -- at $18K a year. Very fun and personally rewarding job, but I foresaw several more years of dues-paying at like salary, and I was living like a poor person.
Then I found out that my not-so-smart high-school buddy was making about twice what I was as a network guy. I had done some page-layout and writing on Macs in college, so using that I moved back to my home city, got a technical writing job, then a year later transitioned into a web-design/development job, then after two years parlayed that into a programmer's job, quadrupling that flight instructor salary (over six times that salary one year, thanks to bonuses). That's where I am now.
It's kind of odd how easy it was, really -- thanks to that boom when fogging a mirror would get you a job, and showing a modicum of aptitude and effort would let you keep it. I've also been very lucky in having jobs where I was encouraged to acquire new skills on the job by taking on technologies I had never worked on before. This is by far the best way to learn, and these opportunities seem to be everywhere, even today, if you show the requisite aptitude and willingness.
I think I'll stick with this career -- it's not necessarily as enjoyable as doing crash-and-goes with primary students and getting the life scared out of me a couple of times a year, but it is certainly easier, and the current and potential salary is greater. Sometimes I do get heartburn over the fact that I spend so much effort now on such unimportant matters in the 'great scheme' of things, when I used to focus on teaching people how not to kill themselves.
Kind thoughts do not change the world
Well I got a certification of Jewellry Technology but became a Rural Mail Carrier but I'm going to night school to get CCNA certification so I can stop being a mailman.
My blog can kick your blog's ass
I graduated from PSU with a B.S. in Premedicine, then went on to Villanova University for an M.S. in Computer Science. Wish i could go back and start over with Comp Sci, Comp Eng, or EE from PSU. The great thing about PSU is that all 3 majors are housed in the College of Engineering (I believe CS was moved over from the Eberly College of Science in 1994 or 1995...I think there has been some talk of moving it into the 'Information Science' dept recently, not sure of that). Anyway, that makes the overlap and mobility between the 3 majors much more significant at PSU than at schools like VU where CS is housed in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. Moreover, CS majors at PSU are required to meet all the general requirements for Engineering -- I for one would consider this a more "rigorous" curriculum than most, and i think that reflects well -- I was sort of alarmed when V.U. didn't require me to have Differential Equations or Multivariable Calculus (Math 140 and 141 from PSU was enough to meet the calc prerequisite for their M.S. in CS). Penn State Engineering has a really solid reputation, terrific funding and resources, and is heavily recruited by major corporations -- you will be well served by any of the 3 degrees. Keep in mind that Comp Eng grads (and to some extent, EE, as well) can usu. go for software positions intended for CS majors, but the converse usu. does not apply. So if u want to keep your options open along hardware/software lines, Comp Eng is probably your best bet. If I had my life to live over again, thats what i would have done (along with spending less time at Players and Cafe 210 West). Go Lions!!!
I went to a medium-sized liberal arts college where I majored in theater. While there, I worked in tech support and eventually managed the helpdesk.
After graduation, I got a job at a large software company as a Program Manager on a ubiquitous productivity suite.
That product shipped, and I decided it was time for something different, so I became a news producer at a mid-size market TV station.
The point? It doesn't matter what you major in. Make sure you're well educated, and can adapt to new environments. Learning how to learn is the best education of all.
If your answer is leader, pick something on a tangent.
I run Operations for a hosting/colo facility. My staff is made up of English Lit, Theater, Music, Business, and yeah a few Engineering degrees. I prefer to pick people from varied backgrounds and educations, why? Their minds are *trained* to be open. They have seen and experienced more than any one-track geek ever will. They have even dated members of the opposite sex! For them technology is both a passion and a career.. it is not however, their life. Nothing is better in the long run for a manager than their staff having a life, especially one that gets them away from work.
As the company grows, my current staff will be the leaders of the next generation of employees.
As for my degree? Bachelor of Fine Arts of course. =) Having graduated in 1985, I was well-placed to ride the wave of technology (PostScript, PageMaker, etc.) that completely transformed my profession between 1986 and 1995.
I majored in EE, was a musician for 10 years, then went into software design.
I forgot a lot of what I learned, but what stuck was a lot of the concepts, which allowed me to leap over a lot of other people in my biz.
Education has given me a way to process and file the knowledge that comes my way throughout life.
Don't fret too much, just get a degree and get on with your life.
If you got a $100 bill, put your hands up...
I got my bachelor's degree in computer science (in 1990), then worked for a computer company for about 2 years. It was an interesting company, but still, I could see that wasn't the career for me.
I thought for a while about what I wanted to do, and decided mathematical biology seemed interesting. I had no idea if I could make a living at it, but figured I could always fall back on my computer skills to get a job if necessary, so I might as well "pursue my dreams".
Many years later, I've got a master's and a PhD in applied math, my particular application being mathematical ecology. I decided I love the academic life, love teaching way more than I expected, and enjoy my area of research. Plus, I still get to play around with computers and build simulation programs. I'm still not quite sure I'll be able to make a living at it (I'm currently in a temporary job), but it has been worth it.
So my advice: try to have a backup plan you can fall back on if necessary (it'll help you worry less), but go for whatever interests you. The future is so unpredictable anyway, no matter how much you try to plan things. I can't tell you how many tiny "chance events" totally turned my life around over the years.
I worked on my degree part-time and took me ten years to get it. My major? History, with a minor in IS. What do I for a living - VP of IS for a software company. I majored in History because it's always been of interest. I minored in IS because I love all things computer, but had more credits already that applied to a History major. I may go back for a Master's in Information Systems. The moral? What your bachelor's degree is in is not as important as the fact that you have one. You can always go back and get a Master's in something else later.
I'm about to graduate from SJSU as an EE, and all of the CompE students paint an ugly picture of the department. The classes are overcrowded, the instructors suck, and lots of the students suck as well. Although I have to admit, in terms of the college of engineering, there are more girls in CompE than in all of the other engineering majors combined, and pretty cute too.
They don't seem to have enough classes, and in some of my EE classes, I find lots of CompE majors. One guy was telling me that they look at the EE professors as really good and extremely competent. That is not the case, and I can't imagine what the typical CompE professor is like.
I was in one class that was being taught by one of the worst professors in the dept, and this CompE major told me that the prof would rate as one of the better intructors in the CompE dept. Oh gawd, don't do it at SJSU, Berkeley has got to be much better for compe/comp sci. Good luck.
Just wanted to add that practically any degree from Penn State, esp. one in any of the majors in the Eberly College of Science or The College of Engineering, is sufficiently broad and well-rounded in its curriculum to facilitate a transition to another field down the road. Premed for example, was 64 cr. science, 64 cr. non-science. If i recall correctly the core science requirements early on are similar for Science and Engineering students -- Physics 201,202,203/204, Chem 12,13, etc. (i know, the course numbers have probably changed, the Physics sequence is different now, but u get the idea). Also, I was definitely one of those science/engineering types that began college regarding liberal arts courses outside my major as bulls@*t -- in the end, some of my most memorable and enjoyable coursework was in pursuit of my "useless" minor in Philosophy. After undergrad, u will find yourself learning more and more about less and less, and will long for the days when u had the chance to learn a little bit about everything. Point is, you'll leave Happy Valley having learned how to think, regardless of your major. The analytical and problem solving skills u pick up there will prove invaluable in all your future endeavors. I found that success in my graduate study in Computer Science was more dependent on my passion for the subject than on the fact that my undergraduate major was Premedicine. The key is to be open-minded and honest with yourself, and find where your true talent and interests lie. And don't forget to take Theatre 100!!!
1995 - Couldn't find a job in biology, so moved to England and got a scholarship to do a MSc in molecular plant pathology. Discovered that even when related to fungus, molecular biology is still really boring.
1997 - Couldn't find a job in biology in England either, so got a job as helpdesk administrator for a large multinational entertainment company. (Last computer course I'd taken was in high school.) Helpdesk engineers outsourced 4 months later. Ended up having to train clueless new contractors. Took a training course, moved into applications development under new boss. Sick and tired of clueless contractors.
1999 - New boss relocated/promoted to Brazil with new staff to fill. I volunteered. (No I did not speak a word of Portuguese at the time.) Moved to Brazil and became Lotus Notes Administrator for Latin America.
2000 - after a year visa problems were about to result in me being kicked out of Brazil, company offered me a promotion to IT manager Australia & New Zealand. Where I am now.
Fungus -> IT manager in 5 years ... not bad! =)
All I ask is a warm bed, a kind word, and UNLIMITED POWER
I first attended college at the California Institute of Technology; I was a chemistry major, but most of my friends were majoring in physics.
By the time I finally graduated from (a much lesser) college, only one person from that group was still a scientist, and he'd gone into astronomy. Nearly all of them had been sucked into the computer industry, including myself.
I think the computing field attracts those who couldn't hack it at a real science; the promised land, where one could earn a six-figure salary for writing ten lines of code a day (not to mention the agreeable prospect of not having to master any difficult mathematics) beckons. The withering of the high-tech job market in Washington has hurt me, but in a way I'm glad it happened--maybe the truly good people will keep on _earning_ their salaries, while the dime-a-dozen computer geeks who got into the business because they though they could make easy money playing with their toys (I include myself in that group) get weeded out.
In 18 months I'll start medical school in the hopes of becoming an orthopaedic surgeon.
I could make the case that physics will help in that I want to understand hoe the body works; and religion will help in trying to understand how people work. But I'm not majoring in these subjects for those reason. I've always known that I've wanted to become a doctor. Instead of becoming just another boring pre-med, I decided to major in something I would really enjoy. In other words, it doesn't matter what your degree says, the only things that truly matter are your experiences and your willingness to learn new things.
I also majored in Electronic Engineering, it's what my diploma says that I have a Bachelor's of Science in. I take out the diploma and look at it from time to time, just for funsies. I heard many times, and found it to be true, that the only thing a college degree proves is that you can finish college.
You really have no way of knowing where your life will go. At one point, early in my 'career', I was offered a position in technical support in a BANK after a manager saw me on stage hosting a Poetry Slam!
The best thing you can do for yourself is finish the EE degree, but take the time to enroll in a few classes outside your major. Try philosophy, history, hell, even Broadcast Journalism. Anything that makes you a more well-rounded person makes you more attractive to companies (and to the sex of your choice:).
Oh yeah, and NETWORK with PEOPLE. I think Harvard even teaches that in their business program. 'How to Network 101' or something.
- Oakbox
Even if your job is finding needles in haystacks, some smart-ass will eventually come along with an electromagnet and make you obsolete . . . diversify!
Not just answers, the correct questions.
Why?
Pussy.
Face it, the best way to get your computer skillz is to actually sit down and get busy. The best way to spend your college days is in classes that are 80% pussy, especially if you're a nerd. Why make it hard on yourself, life is short.
I started college thinking biotech was the way to go, then I saw my classmates and I realized that something had gone terribly wrong. Sure I was more interested in the tech curriculum, but spending my early twenties with that crowd simply didn't jibe with my childhood fantasies of what the university was going to be all about.
After taking a few electives in the English Department the choice was clear. Who cares what you get your BA in anyway? You can always go back and get your MA or PhD in a technical field. And if you want to work with computers all your employers are going to care about is that you know how to get results. You can figure that out on your own.
Maybe this is redundant and posted many times already, but I simply don't have the energy to go through all posts right now.
Anyway, one thing you really should consider is that you choose a major that you think is fun! In other words, does electrical engineering/physics/computer science really interest you? Career perspectives are nice, but job markets change, and if you choose something you don't really like but has great career opportunities, you may find that the job market in that area isn't so hot any more when you graduate. So then you have unmarketable skills in an area that you don't like anyway.
Also, actually graduating is easier if you like your major. It's far easier to motivate yourself if you like the subject (rather obvious, I guess).
My own experiences are that you can't tell what will happen with your career many years down the road. I have an M.Sc. in Electrical Engineering (thought it was fun, never regretted it), got into Computer Science, worked as a programmer in the space business, gradually moved to architecture and design, was a consultant for some years (in the land of the blind, he who has one eye is king), and am working on a (SW/HW) test system for hardware right now. Part of my current job is to manage contacts with customers and suppliers. Not my favorite thing, but hey, it's part of the job. Being a little flexible goes a long way.
Bottom line is that you can't control your future career anyway, so you might as well do something you like. But that's just my 2 cents.
MSN 8: Now Microsoft even has bugs in their ad campaigns.
I studied Art-school in belgium, doing photography, etching etc.. and went over to study nursing, bacame a fully Qualified pediatric nurse ( dont know the male version of nurse... might be the same..LOL) and then went to work in a small company doing virtual reality and cartoons...onto research in a UNI lab ... now I work as a senior consultant at SUN microsystems Belgium... talk about swerving career... ;)
I started as en EE major.
Got my masters in math.
Worked as a Mechanical Engineer as my first job and have been happily coding for 12 years.
Many that I work with hve career paths that are about as "traditional" as mine.
At my school there's a little poster in the physics building that reads "What Physics majors do when the leave school." Research and management were on there along with medical, but the number one item on the list was "Software."
It's my personal opinion that the piece of paper tells people that you are teachable, not that you know the information, but that you can learn it.
Wanted to be a history teacher. In college during the 70's recession. Came out with a BA in Humanities. Went to law school 'cause it was "practical". Spent over 10 years as a trial lawyer and finally left to try teaching. Got a summer job with CompUSA, then did MCSE training on my own and went into consulting. Now with a big global company IT department as a systems guy working with enterprise services on NT/2000, UNIX and the mainframe. Wish I'd had some formal background in programming, etc., but just glad I finally took the chance to do something I really like. Liberal arts taught me how to write, the law taught me how to analyze problems and persuasively advance solutions. No experience is really ever waster. Just have to make the most of what you've got.
How I graduated valedictorian at MIT with a CS degree and had to wash cars for a living because I couldn't find a job.
How everybody, you know, geeks and grandmas, will all switch to Linux and put custom ROMs into their no-copy DVD hardware and that will thwart the music industry. (After all, half of America is on the Internet, and if we all...)
Why scriptKiddies(TM) DOSing is bad, but scriptKiddies ripping music and sharing it around is good.
"All representatives are busy. The estimated hold time is one..hundred..sixty..four..minutes." Detroit Edison, 02/01/02
... who said: "You go to college to learn about what you're going to do for the first five years after you graduate. THEN [you find your career]..."
The closer I get to a full five years, the more right I think she was.
ac
Consider this. I am from India. 9 years ago,when I applied for admission for graduation studies in Computer Science and other engineering subjects, there were 20,000 applicants for about a hundred seats. Out of these 100 odd seats, about 20-25 were for computer science ... they get disillusioned after four years after comparing their job opportunities with that of the software guys....
majors. So what happens to those 75-80 folks who don't get those computer sc. seats? Well, a large part of these are folks who would have liked to do a computer science major, but are now "forced" to go for other majors. Going through this major is basically a formality, for after the fours years, they are in the job market for the software jobs.
The real sufferers are the other disciplines, who spend time teaching students who are not interested. And those students who were, well
So guess what happens?
I am sure things are not that bad in other countries, but in a country of a billion people, with a good graduation a must for social and economic acceptability, I guess this had to happen.
Seriously, I read this and stopped and thought a moment, running a list of people I know thru my head and could only find ONE who had a career in his major: accounting. But look at this list a minute:
Major/Profession
Masters in Digital Art/Blacksmith
Teaching(History)/Bartender(3x the $$$)
Business major/Kindergarden Teacher(!?)
Psychology/Computer Tech(How do you feel about your modem?)
Fine Arts(Painting)/Musician
Fine Arts(Sculpture)/Computer Tech
Liberal Arts/Network Specialist
Masters in Microbiology/Night stock crew in grocery store????(makes more than his field)
...it just gets weirder from there.
College these days has little to nothing to do with what you will do for a living. Especially since most employers will want a degree, nothing specific, just a degree. Who needs a degree to be a salesman anyway? My advice: Go to school for something you enjoy that you have a talent for, but most importantly, learn to do other things while you're there and make sure your major teaches you to do something you can turn into self-employment or freelance if need be.
I majored in physics at UCLA...
Then spent 17 years building houses, apprenticing and then working as electrician, plumber, drywaller, framer, trim carpenter, cabinet maker, millright, painter, mason, before finally settling on my real career -
General contractor... oops, hated that, back to owning a small cabinet shop... But wait, what's that money thing I keep hearing about? Don't ever seem to have any of that.
Took an intense systems admin in UNIX class. I had been using and tweaking computers since 1986, in DOS, and loved the command line. Got a job doing support for Solaris webservers, and drifted into managing (Windows) desktops and (NT) servers. Quit and went to a Solaris only shop, managing 1400 firewall servers. Then the start-up I am at now which is doing quite well. Now I do network architecture and protocol and service workability (guru) and mostly work from home and do what the hell interests me and looks good on my resume. I truly love it.
The best advice I have seen so far is decide what you want to have, then decide what you want to do for that level of lifestyle that will produce that kind of income, then decide what you would have to be to do that. "What Color is Your Parachute" is good as well, for discovering what the hell you should be doing when you grow up. It is never a straight line, unless you want a boring life. If you are job hunting via resumes and interviews, truly, check out the Parachute book - that job hunt was statistically doomed.
I am now looking about ten to fifteen years ahead to what next, and it is between a sheriff for a small western town, and baseball player or fireman...
Seriously, if you don't wake up every once in a while and look around you and say "They're paying me for this? Hell, I'd (almost) do it for free..." then your life is in a rut and eventually that rut will become the open sewer of corporate or blue collar hell.
Best of luck, follow your dreams to the money.
My first degree was in European languages, but I didn't like the thought of working abroad so I followed my geeky little heart and took an MSc in Computer Science. I love the work, though the lack of job security kind of sucks..
Actually, I originally went in as a computer science major, but after seeing the way the industry is turning for network engineers and techs I decided to change majors to accounting and go for my CPA to make a career change and become an accountant. I still love working on computers and I'll always be a geek, but I like the ideas and principles of accounting and truthfully I think there's a more secure future in it.
Here's one of the best possible routes through college I've seen. This was my roomate's path, and I have to say I'm a bit more than jealous. Take the easiest, shortest route through. The major with the least credits and the easiest classes. Its is usually some social science or religious studies (sorry, but its true). Have fun, party, but get all A's: its easy to because there are no diff eq's to trip you up. Once finished doodle around a bit, have fun, but apply for grad school. With your 4.0 GRADE AVERAGE you'll get into Harvard (or the like-pedigree makes a huge difference!). And besides, who wouldn't want a well rounded religious studies major signing up for comp sci or law. Moral of the story. My ex-roomie pulls down high 6 figures after a law degree from Georgetown! not bad for a religious studies major who, when finished logged trees for a year or two to make ends meat. Mod this one up. Its a true story, and if I had to do it again, I'd do it this way...
there's already 400 comments so you'll never read this, but for what it's worth, i grew up wanting a career in music, and only had computers as a hobby. hobby meaning, i was into the bbs's in middle school etc, more so than the average person.
i got to college and the music education program sucked the fun right out of music for me, so i looked into the CS track, and that *was* fun. so i kept music as a hobby and turned to computers as my career, and now work as an admin and webmistress for a software development/database solutions company.
and that's what happened to the little band geek... now a computer geek...
Further, no one ever asks your major once you've worked one job in the field...
Further, no one ever asks your major once you've worked one job in the field...
First I started school as an Electrical engineering student, but got bored and joined the army... learned to speak Arabic there. Got out, went back to school to study EE. Got bored again, changed to Middle East Studies. Meanwhile, I started working as a systems adminstrator at a local university. Finally finished the Mideast Studies degree and I am now persuing an MBA.
I'm not quite sure what I want to do, but I'll eventually figure it out when I get there. I won't be surprised if I end up teaching math in high school! Either way, it's been a very non-traditional route!
I would say, though, that every job in I've gotten , it wasn't about certifications, but how well I interfaced with the people during the interviews. It's not so much what degrees you have, but how you work with people, what you know that is specific to the job, and most importantly your ability and willingness to learn!
(of course, if you want to be a geneticist, I highly recommend taking some biology!)
22 hours of class doesn't mean 22 hours in the class room and labs. It means 22 credit hours of classes. My typical weekly schedule was 22 hours in class, 12 hours in lab, many hours of homework, 20 hours of work at a job to help pay for school. That means about 60-80 hours a week of work and academics. Add in clubs and sports and it becomes a real schedule.
Aprat from the systems, the place and the events it might have been about me!
Mj
I'm currently a first year majoring in CS. I'm considering a switch into computer engineering next year, and was wondering which degree would open more oppurtunities once i graduate? Which would provide a higher paying job? I've got a friend in ECE right now, taking quite a few of the same courses I'm doing, how similar is it? Is it much harder? In general what sort of jobs will come out of each? I haven't been able to figure much out from my university, so I figured maybe some experienced individuals can shed some light on this. :P
Thanks.
A chunk of advice for all those still in college -- study abroad if you get the chance. Studying abroad really helped me broaden myself out, and I don't think I'll ever forget the experiences I had overseas. You can do it and graduate, even if you're a science major, or you have loans, or you have met this wonderful girl and she's really the one and you're 20. If you're interested, go! Don't make excuses for yourself, everything else will work itself out.
cheers-
willis/
there is no thing
what else could you want?
Started out in liberal arts undergrad as MusicEd major. Moved through Science, Math majors before settling on Economics (just to get out within 5 years...) - for Grad school I was working on a Military History Master's degree when, at my part-time career library job, I literally "fell" into web programming. This was some time ago, when the departments of the university were just waking up and saying "Hey, we should have a presence on the web..." - well, it just rolled from there. Got some formal education after wrapping up the MA with an MIT degree at an accellerated program (which I do NOT recommend) and doing some pretty cool SysAdmin work now... Quite a ways from Sight Singing (Lord how I despised that class...)
Brain: Promise me something, Pinky. Never breed.
When I was in college, I started out in an engineering program, simply because I wanted something challenging. However, I've always been terrible at math (don't ask why; I understand concepts just fine, but when it comes to performing computations I'm useless without Maple.) So when it was apparent that I wouldn't get good grades continuing as a chemical engineering major, I switched to chemistry. I finished my degree, and enjoyed it immensely. And I even learned thermodynamics after the third exposure to it in three separate classes. :)
About the same time, I got a part-time job as a tech support monkey. I had been messing with computers since I was 7 or so, just as a hobby. CompSci was never a thought of mine, since I sucked at math the whole way through school. But the tech support job really turned me on to the whole networking/IT field. By the end of school, I had given up on the idea of being a chemist and spent most of my free time working and looking for an IT job.
When it came time to interview, most employers were quite impressed that I had obtained a degree in a tough science. (unless you had a good high school chem teacher, you'll never enjoy it.) In my experience, having a degree in something is good. Having a degree in something hard is better. But either one gets you in the door.
So do what you want in college. It'll be the last time you can easily do that.
Yes, I graduated after a short 7 years with a bachelor's degree in Marketing. A few years later, I was a network/PC technician. Now I'm a database administrator and web applications programmer. Another friend with a degree in business management is also a DBA/Sysadmin. Another friend has a history degree and is a hardware/network guru.
The moral is: Having a degree is important. It opens doors. What the degree is in is not so important. What you know (and who you impress) is more important.
THree Mile Island happened, nearly all reactor orders were cancelled, and the Nuclear Engineering Division of GE didn't send anyone to take the two graduate classes I needed for the degree (and they weren't going to offer them for a single undergraduate
I answered the Navy's ad for nuclear engineers, but they diverted me to fly--but I have no coordeination, so I got an honorable discharge and a plain ticket home.
I'd enjoyed the limited legal analysis in the Naval Law class, and chose law school over a Ph.D. in aviation engineering.
After five years of that, I landed back in graduate school for a Ph.D. in Econ, and ended up leaving with a degree jointly in econ and stat . . .
Most people don't move this much, but take the courses/major that interestyou. As long as you have enough math, you can pretty much move from anything to anything--but it really helps to learn your calculus and linear algebra young.
hawk
All my higher level training has been on the job, I trained first in Electronics, then took a post grad in marketing, moving from control systems engineering though to semiconductor marketing and now do public relations for Electronics and Telecoms clients.
Based on my experince,I'd grab all the different strands of experince and qualifications you can, through formal and informal learning. The cross fertilisation between the different skills you have is bound to be of value to somone! Yes a plan is great, but don't over specialise too soon, if ever! You never know when the cosy niche you rule will disappear!
By the way, when I was 16, I was absolutely, without doubt, joining the navy....
You ought to take this post and repost it in response to every new story that applies to life decisions. Then see how many times you get modded up for this.
It really is amazing...
Please mod this post only if you think others should/n't read this. I have enough ego^H^H^Hkarma. Thanks!
pretty much all philosophy, english, or art majors?? :)
mark