What should I major in?

b_r_um
Fri, 15 Jun 2012 02:46:09 +0000

To follow up on TomServo: most universities start all of their students out as “undeclared” until the students declare a major. Depending on your university (or college within the university) that usually happens between your 2nd and 4th semester.



At the beginning, I was always think, is cs what I want…then I found out I just want to learn programming language.

How did you arrive at that conclusion? I find it difficult to believe that you just want to learn programming languages without ever writing a program. If you also like to program, you might be asking yourself “How do I write good programs?” or “How can I write a program that does _____?”

Most CS classes in college will make you a better programmer. Some will be more theoretical (how do you make algorithms more efficient?); some will give you the background to write a wider variety of programs (e.g. classes on operating systems or databases or 3D animation); and some will just show you good programming practices that allow you to work efficiently on large-scale projects.

If someone has told you that computer science is all about the theory of computing and not at all about programming, ignore them. (They are technically right, but it doesn’t matter because all of that theory is translated directly into code. CS is all about the programming. I ended up changing my major to math because I got too annoyed by the hands-on computer scientists and was looking for more theory.)