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?

Comments

Career?

[JanneM]

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