I’m a CS and math double major, music minor. I want to go into cryptography, most likely cryptanalysis.
My path to my majors was kind of interesting. Ever since I can remember, I’d always wanted to be a vet. I was seriously obsessed with medicine and animals. I watched all kinds of medical shows as a kid and still know way more about medicine than many of the “pre-meds” at my university (part of it is also because my mom’s a doc). However, freshman year bio at my high school we had to do a frog dissection and I couldn’t stomach it, so I knew right there that being a vet was not for me. Since I was a little kid, I’ve always excelled at and loved math. When I went to the bookstore with my parents all my childhood, my parents would say ok, you can pick out a book. Most kids, especially around age 4-7, would pick out picture books, right? Nope, I’d pick out math workbooks. So when I realized that being a vet wasn’t for me, math was the obvious choice. That summer, I took computer science at my high school. I absolutely loved it and was great at it. It just made sense, like math. The next two years (sophomore and junior year) I actually dabbled in circuitry and electronics (took both analog and digital courses), which I loved, but ultimately senior year came back to computer science. I didn’t discover I loved cryptography so much until second semester senior year when I took a course at my high school. That one semester, it just clicked that that was what I was meant to do. It also reinforced my choices for my majors, since cryptanalysis involves both CS and math.
I’m about to start my sophomore year of college and I’d say I’m about 1/3 through the math and CS majors. I am happy with those two majors. Most of my qualms are more constraints of the school I chose. I’d love to pursue my love of circuitry, but my university doesn’t have any electronics courses. I also wish that I could do a music major with a focus in composition and theory and not a minor but with the way our schedules are set up and the course rotations, I don’t think I can fit a couple of the required courses for that and still take the relevant electives to my career path in addition to the math and CS core courses.