My Major and My Career for College

[Low Hanging Fruit]

Focus on a degree you enjoy. I will be honest with you I have a degree in electrical engineering and I manage a construction company. Does that degree help a little? Sure. But it was more the fact I had a college degree that got me the job rather then what it was in. Most people that go to college and get a degree in a particular field (at least in the USA) don't end up working in the field they went to school for. So just aim for what you love, something that can keep you interested, something that you know you can understand/get, and then just make it though the 4 years with decent grades and some recommendations. That way if you land in that field great (you are lucky), if you don't then tons of options are still available. Money isn't the best motivator because for the whole time you are in college (unless you are already rich) you won't have any money when you need it most. You need things to motive you THEN and not in some mythical future. Take it from someone that made that mistake his first 2 years and failed out and then had to go back again and follow something with a little bit of the passion.

[Annoying]

Don't go into a field just for the money, you will need to really love the goal you are pursuing to overcome your math difficulties. If you did really well in those subjects you listed because you love those subjects, then you should do something that will let you use the skills you like using.

http://lifehacker.com/5280491/the-ro...he-hooray-zone

Precisely. You just described the "learn to say no" intersection.

You absolutely don't want a job that you don't enjoy. It's miserable. You can learn to be better, you can even work to get paid well for jobs that don't traditionally pay well.
But it's really, really hard to make yourself like something better.

What you actually need to take, and what you actually use are different... also depends on what you actually do.

Yep. I write scientific simulation software and avionics. Tons and tons of fairly high-level maths. All my friends who are in my field (not coworkers, obviously) do webdev or appdev and use nothing past grade 12 math.

[Kuntantee]

That's entirely dependent on what you end up doing. I use one dimensional partial differential equations daily, and I'm a software engineer.

Yet, you don't need to be good at math to be a good programmer. In programming, you don't need math until you need it.

OP, do what you love.

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Wut. I'm pretty sure all you have to do is Calc3 and differential equations. Not a whole lot of math if you ask me.

As far as CS is concerned, I suggest taking math classes online. They're easier (If you're good at keeping up with shit and not being lazy that is) and you don't actually need the math classes for most CS jobs.

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Bitch, I'm gonna be a dancing major, watch me.

CS is all about math. Programming is not. You do not learn CS on undergraduate, you learn a bit of programming and CS fundamentals in four years. Go check what people research on CS.

Most CS programs involve fallowing:

-Numerical Analysis
-Probability
-Statistics (sometimes merged with prob)
-Differential Equations,
-Linear Algebra (sometimes merged with Diff Eq.)
-Calculus(probably 2 courses),
-Discrete Math.

[Annoying]

I remember the hardest "math" (logic really) I had to do was when I was learning assembly, and had write a bubble sort....

Were you full CS? Or computer engineering or something derivative? I couldn't imagine a bubble sort being the hardest math in a curriculum. We had finite automata and algorithms. Formal proofs were a nightmare. I also couldn't imagine a bubble sort being all you did in assembly. We wrote C compilers, which is a ton of assembly.

Yet, you don't need to be good at math to be a good programmer. In programming, you don't need math until you need it.

Yeah, you can be a programmer without being good at math. You're not going to get a job that requires you to be good at math, though, limiting what outcomes you can expect with a fresh degree. When I work on mission-critical avionics, I have to provide loop invariants for everything, as well as runtime complexity proofs. I can't imagine that we'd ever hire someone who hasn't done well on algorithms and calc 3+.

[Annoying]

I was learning x86 assembly because I was trying to improve the CRC32 checksum speed in a file scanner... ended up using Adler-32 instead.

That's too bad that you're already done with it. I've got a wicked fast x86_64 merge sort lying around somewhere.

[Catta]

Equally, don't go into a field that doesn't pay if you're spending a lot of money for the education on that field.

Unless, of course, you're independently wealthy and can justify the expense.

You doctor yet? Talk to me when you doctor!

[Reeve]

You doctor yet? Talk to me when you doctor!

I'll doctor your face with my fist! Seriously though, are you done cutting up dead bodies yet?

[Kuntantee]

Yeah, you can be a programmer without being good at math. You're not going to get a job that requires you to be good at math, though, limiting what outcomes you can expect with a fresh degree. When I work on mission-critical avionics, I have to provide loop invariants for everything, as well as runtime complexity proofs. I can't imagine that we'd ever hire someone who hasn't done well on algorithms and calc 3+.

If you stick with STL and utilize it as much as possible (not sure if you can use it), you don't need to calculate run-time complexities by hand as all complexities of STL algorithms are known. Never done that invariant thing in a formal way. Tho, I've never programmed anything related defense industry.

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That's too bad that you're already done with it. I've got a wicked fast x86_64 merge sort lying around somewhere.

Faster than code produced by C++ compiler?

GOD! So much off-topic. I will repeat and shut up.

Do what you love.

[Garnier Fructis]

What does it take to understand math!

I sucked at math until I realized that sucking at math is mostly a mindset. Also, don't be lazy. If you aren't Terence Tao, which the vast majority of us aren't, then you only build skill by doing problems.

1. Change your mindset. Math is something you can do.
2. Practice your problem areas.
3. Be patient and persistent.

You mostly have to teach yourself. Here's what I mean. You can listen to a teacher tell you how to solve a problem, but you need to actually solve the problem to really get it. Teachers are there to guide you, but if you've convinced yourself that you can't do it, than no teacher will be able to fix that.

[grimsanta]

Here's my point of view on this:

Despite being good at math, I decided fairly out of nowhere to go into engineering when I went to university. Upon my arrival, I was faily lost. The other kids were far, far ahead of me. Not in the math department (and keep in mind in your case, they will be in your case), but in others. Many, many of my peers already had a few programming languages under their belt. They knew how to read all sorts of schematics, and were used to taking everything apart and put it back together.

The most successful engineers were these kids. The one's who have been living for this type of work their entire lives. And it goes a step further. The classes you take, in any major, very rarely reflect the jobs that you will get.

When you think computer science, you think of people building programs. What you don't think of is the mindless hours and hours and hours of building a program, debugging it, compiling it, finding more errors, and doing that again. Does that sound fun? To some it may, but to most, it doesn't.

To me, you sound like me. You can be highly interested in a subject, but that doesn't mean you can do it. I can tell you a ridiculous amount about our universe. I've read many, many books on the cosmos, relativity, the main forces, astronomy, etc...But I can't do the math for astrophysics. Still, I enjoy watching shows about it and listening to podcasts about the subjects. Those are my hobbies. It's neat to watch a TV show and see all those galaxies fly by. But in real life, astronomers sit in front of data, analyzing it slowly, and using advanced math to get an idea of what is going on. And over their entire lifetimes, they may discover one, small puzzle piece. It's a dull life. (I know you aren't talking about astronomy, I'm giving an example of what's interesting isn't always the best career).

If you're not good at math though, you're in luck. With a good enough grad exam score, you can get a liberal arts education, with some programming classes, and still get into a grad program. Well, at least in the US, maybe not the UK. I'm not sure.

Also, I think you're thinking too small here too. There are so many jobs that you haven't even looked at. Trust me. I didn't even know what finance really entailed until my junior year, and then changed focuses to that immediately. Loved it.

But whatever your heart tells you now, it rarely will say the same in 5 years. Do what you love, that is within your capability. It's a balance. I already said, I would love to be an astronomer, but I don't have the capability. I would hate working numbers as a stats guy all day, but I'm good at that. So instead i analyze data for certain government programs. It's stats + critical thinking. Interesting, some math involved, but not too hard. It's a good balance. Not glamourous, but good.

And even then, choosing a major based on a career can be bad too. Because if your career choice falls through, you'll be useless.

Finally, advanced degrees are more important now days. An undergrad degree now days just says that you're willing to commit and study. So the actual major doesn't matter as much. In my job, we have historians, lawyers, engineers, and business people, all doing the same job.

So as an example, here's a run down of my life choices and where it led me.

Went to school for engineering.
Junior year switched to Business Finance and Political Science.
Graduated during recession, no finance jobs available.
Got job with government as a data worker, boring, but paid the bills.
Showed off some skills in programming and got a job in automation support.
Showed off my ability to think critically and applied for a job in another agency where I analyze data and studies.
So who the hell knows where you're gonna end up. Find classes that you enjoy, and mold yourself slowly.

[Annoying]

If you stick with STL and utilize it as much as possible (not sure if you can use it), you don't need to calculate run-time complexities by hand as all complexities of STL algorithms are known. Never done that invariant thing in a formal way. Tho, I've never programmed anything related defense industry.

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Faster than code produced by Intel C++ compiler?

No STL when it comes to mission-critical. Most of it's done in C or assembly. We get a few things we can use C++ for, and the STL documentation does our runtime stuff for us, as you say. The invariants are the important part, though. Being able to prove a loop will always do what you want it to do is quite important. And the merge sort would probably be equal to the compiler, (i've got my O(n log n) proof for it somewhere in my piles of documentation) -- it exists because we have certain things that get done entirely in assembly.

[Deleted]

I think you have a very limited understanding of what you can do with a humanities degree. I did as well at your age, partly because some current fields didn't quite exist at the time and partly because there was a lot of ignorance and lack of interest related to these fields.

It's absolutely wrong to think of history or literature as "hobbies," although, of course, anyone can dabble in anything at an amateur level and find it easy. The reality is that whatever you do in high-school in these disciplines bears little similarity to what you do later on, when you are expected to follow a rigorous methodology and acquire knowledge in a number of cognate fields (philosophy, history of ideas, history of religion, foreign languages, etc.). You don't sit around in a circle talking about your feelings, but you're taught how to think, read, and write critically - skills which are instrumental in any job.

More to the point, teaching is probably the least exciting option unless it happens to be something you're interested in. Aside from the obvious academic path, there are fields like book history, cultural heritage, digital humanities, traditional and e-publishing, etc. There has been a massive push for digitalization over the past decade or so, which means that libraries, archives, and any significant repository institutions are looking for ways to not only preserve their collections in this manner, but also to offer improved access. For this, they need project managers and programmers who have a deep understanding of their material and its uses, i.e. people who have both a humanities background and a business/CS background.

Library software is evolving very fast and a lot of institutions are creating personalized tools and extensions to deal with their respective collections. There are tools for pretty much anything - collaborative transcription and translation, cataloging, connecting the databases of different institutions into massive repositories, etc. Because the projects are so diverse and so much information is being revisited and updated when a project is run, there are things to do not only for people who create these tools, but also for people who create or rectify the actual content: art historians, photography specialists, book historians, traditional historians, literary scholars, librarians, etc. There are also more technical jobs, such as restoration (which tends to be done in parallel with the digitization) and digitization (old and fragile books and documents aren't fed through scanners, but require very delicate handling and a fair bit of knowledge of digital tools to create perfect digital copies).

If you're not stellar at Math and have all these other interests, I think you should take a serious look at what digital humanities has to offer. While you do need a serious background in Computer Science, the skills you'll need are essentially practical - you'd be a developer, not someone grappling with theoretical problems. You also need to understand the field you're developing for - the kind of research they do, the sort of tools that they need or could conceivably find useful, etc. I don't know if you have the option of double-majoring or doing a combined degree, but I think that doing one humanities major + Computer Science or perhaps something similar might be a good option for you.

[Catta]

I'll doctor your face with my fist! Seriously though, are you done cutting up dead bodies yet?

For now, yes.