I am in my final year of high school and I need to decide a major path pretty soon. I will be attending community college first before transferring to a 4 year university and I want to work for Disney in the future. Specifically, I want to work for the Walt Disney Imagineering company and I know that most people who work there are engineering majors. But I think the company is not all engineers, so basically I want to know is what type of majors can help me work for Walt Disney Imagineering in the future?
3-D animation, 3-D Computer Graphics, Game Design, Game Animation, Game Programming, Design, Digital Media, Digital Arts.
Background in software engineering/computer science would also be pretty useful.
The best way to figure this out is to look at the types of jobs you want and see what skills and qualifications they ask for (keeping in mind that economies are ever-changing and things may have shifted a bit by the time you graduate).
Searching for “imagineer” in the Disney jobs listing reveals a lot of different kinds of jobs, but in the top-level description, this is how they describe Walt Disney Imagineering:
“Walt Disney Imagineering is the master planning, creative development, design, engineering, production, project management, and research and development arm of The Walt Disney Company. Its talented corps of Imagineers is responsible for the creation - from concept initiation through installation - of all Disney Resorts, theme parks and attractions, real estate developments, regional entertainment venues, and new media projects.”
So it seems like there are endless majors that can fit in there. Engineering and art/animation are core to this work, of course, so those majors will probably give you the greatest chances of finding work in that arm of the company. But production, project management, and R&D can fit in people from many different majors. Looking at the current openings, most of them are for engineers and artists with a computer science background, but they also hire finance folks and project managers.