Seeking advice on changing major

Reactor
Wed, 17 Jul 2013 04:59:46 +0000

I don’t think CS is a hot field, although that depends on how one personally views it (for some it could be a hot field). There’s a lot of need for people that know how computers work and how they are used or how they are programmed, because most don’t and a huge number of our processes are ran using computers and software and that number will only increase, and that’s not going to go anywhere. However, the software industry is a bit volatile, unless you happen to work at one of the staple companies, whose products, whatever they are, are always bought and there’s a lot of invested money. There’s a lot of room for being very innovative in software, lots of interesting research concepts and projected changes in uses of computer technology as well as new software, but for that you need to have ideas or hook up with people who have ideas.

CS is excellent as a general study of concepts and practice that’s applicable almost everywhere, even if there aren’t computers. But per se it’s not straightforwardly applicable, because it depends on where and how it’s applied (I think you need a bit of creativity for figuring out the really interesting things). Notice that I don’t consider mainstream IT to have much relevancy to the topics CS education and research really deals with. Mainstream IT is the described “fashion industry, where you keep up with trends”. CS is about figuring out new uses for computers and better and novel ways for doing computation.