Picking a Major (and wrangling interests)

juillet
Fri, 29 Jul 2016 07:54:24 +0000

Thoughts:

First, I want to tackle the idea of ‘picking up a book or two’. You can theoretically teach yourself anything. And some people are better in certain things than others - some people would easily and readily be able to teach themselves to code and computer architecture and stuff, while they struggle teaching themselves philosophical concepts or social science research methods; others might thrive by reading voraciously about anthropology and archaeology and struggle teaching themselves statistics. There aren’t any topics that are just universally “harder” to pick up on your own, IMO; it’s all relative.

That said, let’s understand for a moment that focused, guided study into something is very different from picking up a book. You could borrow library books on all of the topics here, and read and practice on your own. But that’s different from taking a psychology lab class and actually doing research methods right there in the lab, or doing a regional planning practicum for that major, or doing studio art classes and having your work critiqued by a trained artist and your talented peers. It’s really about choices - which experiences do you want to have in a more guided, structured fashion and which ones are you okay with picking up independently?

1. Psychology is very useful in human-computer interaction; this is the field I work in, and my background (undergrad and grad) is in psychology. Whether or not you should minor or double major really depends on how much you want to delve into the topic. Taking some classes or minoring in it will likely be enough, particularly if you want to be a software developer or designer who simply uses psychological principles in your work; if you want to focus on UX/UI design or HCI research work or something, a major would be more useful.

2. Statistics is also very useful in CS in general, and HCI in particular. Given the boom in big data/data science, a combo of CS and stats is very lucrative and in high demand. I have some expertise in statistics. My opinion is that learning the basics is best done in a guided fashion like in a class, but once you have a good foundation you can teach yourself new techniques and skills through books and the Internet (and statistics as a field is very big on self-teaching). Similarly, whether you double major or minor depends on what you want to do. If you’re interested in machine learning, data science, natural language processing, etc. a double major could be really useful! If you just want to kind of use some stats in your work then a minor would be okay.

3. Is there a such thing as a visualization major? Wouldn’t the major just be art? Whether or not the work would be too much kind of depends on the school that you go to and how intense their program is.

4. Having two seemingly unrelated majors is fine, although I think they are related (think building software or other technological tools for city planners/regional planners to use in their work, or integrating technology into the planned urban spaces, or understanding the influence of technology on urban/regional building and vice versa).

5. You don’t need a business minor to start your own business.

6. You can learn Russian without minoring in Russian, but if you have an interest in Russian culture, history, and/or literature in addition to language a minor in Russian would be good.

Basically, the point is any of these can be a good choice and it’s really up to you. Choices #1 and #2, and to a certain extent #3, have more direct relationships to the kind of work you currently envision yourself doing. #5 and to a certain extent #3 sound more like passion projects - things that you’re just interested in and want to learn more about. Both are equally valid ways to pick a minor (or a major, for that matter), so it really just depends on where your interests lie.

Because the urban/regional planning thing is a nice combo of your interests and potentially career-relevant I’d lean towards that, at least at first, but it also is the major you’re least likely to find at your average college.