Hello, I'm coming closer to the end of high school and I'm at this part when I'm trying to figure out what to do with my life. I want to be a writer I love expressing my ideas and imagination, but because writing takes a while and i don't really know whether i will be successful enough to make a living out of it. i will have to get a job while doing that. so I would like to go to university and study something, but I don't know what yet, so while I'm still searching while I'm still searching for it why not ask you guys for any opinion. I really love thinking, philosophy, science, and art. But when it comes to university I am only able to go to s.t.e.m fields. So what do you think?
Nursing. It's unlikely that you will fall passionately, madly in love with a career that will pay you what you think you deserve. It's even less likely that you will accomplish this between now and graduation. A nursing degree will provide you with more-than-ample compensation and ample employment opportunities all over the world. You are immune from offshoring, you're likely to be unionized and you'll have a great background in everything from HR to health sciences. Will you be a nurse? Probably not. If you are, will you stay a nurse? Probably not. But it's good to be able to earn money doing something you sort-of enjoy so that you can spend money profligately on the stuff you really enjoy while you figure it out. I have an engineering degree. I was able to buy bunches of synthesizers, fuck around on my own time, and mix bands in clubs for peanuts because even as an undergrad I was pulling down 4x minimum wage. Guys in the bands I mixed? Yeah, they worked service jobs or played in cover bands. Think about that - dude with an Einsturzende Neubauten tattoo playing Kool & The Gang covers 4 nights a week to pay the rent. Free your ass and your mind will follow.
Programming. Like writing, you can create whatever you want from scratch, there are thousands of ways to do what you want to do, imagination and creativeity are very helpful. And if you spend a lot of time on something in programming, chances are it will get used because a good program can be identified instantly. It's high-pay, high-demmand and low supply. It costs nothing but a computer and a internet connection to get into. Also, you mentioned writing, programming and writing go well together if you're making a game. In fact, Programming goes well with pretty much any form of media you feel like being creative with
I'm kinda late but thanks for the answer. This totally something that I would enjoy doing for a living. Thank you!
Hacking arduinos (or whatever - raspberry pi), and making simple little robots is a great way to get C and embedded programming experience. It will impress hirers if you have done some hobby programming that you can speak passionately about in interviews - a way to get around the no-job-experience hurdle when job-searching.
I was going to suggest this. It's really fun thinking of an idea, designing how to make a computer do it, and seeing your creation come to life before your eyes. If you're average or below at programming, it's seemingly high-supply/low-demand, though. Also, I don't know if I'd agree with you that programming and writing go well together. To me it seems like a completely different thinking/creative process.
Well I meant that if you're making a game, in my opinion the most fun thing you can do programming, it would normally help to write a story. That said, I do think there are some simularities in programming and story writing. Deciding variable and function names is a bit like choosing what word to use when you're writing, a OOP program's structure is similar in some ways to a storie's: A character is an Object, it's opportunities/personality traits are like methods/functions in the way that it helps to keep them on your mind for good times to use them. There are also times in both story writing and programming where you have to connect two parts together in an elegant way after you notice what was connecting them doesn't work. There are lots of elements of what I mentioned that are completely different, but I think some elements are similar.
It's high-pay, high-demmand and low supply.
There are a lot of people who want to work in the field, and not a lot who are particularly good at it. If your problems are trivial and your budget is large, you can find plenty of warm bodies to sling Java for you and they'll probably manage something close enough to what you need eventually. If you're doing something hard or can't afford the cost of making your developers work in a straightjacket, it's much harder to find someone who can do the job. Programming is a great career if you want to eat, breath and dream code, because if you're good competition is slim. It is a bad career if you just want to trade a third of your day 5 days a week for decent money. People who talk about programming on the Internet make it sound like it's great for everyone, because people who want to spend their time talking about programming on the Internet are usually the former.
This is so very true. If you try it and find you have the knack, it can give you a good life (it has for me). If you try it and find you don't have the knack, please abandon it and find something else. if you're good competition is slim
I've always been a C guy, but I did dabble with Turbo Pascal. Back in the days before gcc, C compilers were only available on Unix machines (well, there was a MS C compiler for the PC, but it was shit back then), so Turbo Pascal was a freakin' godsend for low-budget PC developers. That initial compiler was amazballs - a full-featured (mostly) Pascal compiler, linker, and editor - and they didn't even fill up one 360K floppy for all that magic. All that changed pretty fast, but Borland deserved 100% of their early success.
What, like TPascal wasn't a problem? Granted - the BASIC was contemporary. Prolly '81, '82. TPascal was in Windows 95 if I'm not mistaken. Any school that actually wanted you to learn programming had long since switched to Cplusplus... much like my program did, right after I transferred out of it. ...into another program that required us to run composite matrix transforms on the DEC Alpha in the basement, which involved compiling mutherfucking fortran in 1998. That peaced me out of programming pretty effectively.
By the time Windows came around, Turbo Pascal was already well ruined by bloat, unfortunately.
I was using it back when DOS 3.1 was king. Yeah I'm old as dirt.
Donald Knuth, from the April 1996 Dr. Dobbs (Dr. Dobbs used to be worth reading)DDJ: Is the profile of a programmer (which we were discussing earlier) one of an individual who needs this sort of control?
DK: That's an interesting concept, the need for power! I've always thought of it more in other terms, that the psychological profiling is mostly the ability to shift levels of abstraction, from low level to high level. To see something in the small and to see something in the large.
I'd say it's a good indicator if you enjoy it enough that you work on projects because you want to, not because you have to. If you like programming that much, you will get good at it eventually. The process will be arduous, but your motivation will carry you onward.
I'm not really sure - for some people programming just seems to come easy, and I'm one of those people. When I was entering University (1982), I had no idea what I wanted to do, and had never programmed anything. Enrolled as a general "Engineering" student, thinking 'maybe aerospace engr?'. We had to learn C as an introductory ENGR class, and it just clicked with me. I could see that most of the other students were really struggling but it all made sense to me; I helped a lot of other students through that class, because it just seemed easy to me. Switched majors that semester and never looked back.
That sounds like a love story. I had done a free C cource at UCC a couple years ago, similar story. I was helping anyone that I wasn't too shy to approach. It was a fairly short, pretty basic course but it was the first step to hopefully a long future of programming.
For a long time I had this printed out and hanging in my cubicle (it's from "The Mythical Man-Month", which every programmer must read) :
Business degree. You can position it in many, many ways. I always say that my kids can major in anything as long as they double major in business. Want to be an artist? Great, learn the business side too. Want to be an athlete? Good luck, learn the business side too. It touches everything.
I'm in a really cool major my self that you might be interested in. It's called Cognitive Science which is comprised of philosophy, neuroscience, psychology, computer science (artificial intelligence), linguistics and anthropology. It's STEM and it involves a lot of really deep thinking. Look into it!
I can hardly say I'm qualified to answer a question about what career you should end up seeking, especially because - in the U.S., at least - it appears that a substantial portion of people don't work in a field related to their degree. I believe it was a career building website that conducted a poll in late 2013 (I can't find it at the moment) that said 1/3 of respondents over 35 had never worked a job in their field of study, and 47% of college graduates took a first job outside that field as well. It becomes a question of work experience and transferring hard skills from your schooling. With that said? Remember that you can study things on your own time, as well. Many degree plans have some electives and wiggle room, and at the universities I've looked at or attended for IT/Comp Sci/Engineering, there are still a few writing-intensive courses. It may not be creative writing, but honing the ability to communicate in a technical or professional manner with the occasional turn of phrase or subtle wit is something that will serve you well. You could also consider the interaction of hard science and the humanities - how does math influence certain types of art? What about the ethical and moral considerations of scientific advances? What are the implications of developing artificial intelligence? So on and so forth. Keep questioning, keep learning, don't be afraid to study or read on your own time to further your interests, and don't let the fire of knowledge die down. Best of luck!
Just go to school and take some classes you think are interesting. There are careers and fields you're totally unaware of. If I had some of the life experience I gained while brutally poor and working on the dock at a Walmart, I might have pursued logistics which I find interesting and didn't know anything of until I was in my late twenties. When I was 17 I had all the experience of a high schooler and I liked art, I knew that was a thing I liked in high school, so that's what I majored in. Now I spend every week on a scale ranging from severe to moderate financial disaster. Maybe don't even go to school right away. Life experience is cheaper and you might find what you enjoy that way and then can go to school for it.
I've found that the most important thing is to decide on a plan as early as possible and start working towards it. The specifics of the plan aren't so important as the goal oriented mindset it'll give you. The people with vague motivations to take a couple years of basic courses and see what they like often end up late to the game when their peers are making connections, doing internships, and applying to professional schools. I'm not saying that spending time to explore your options is a bad thing, but tuition isn't cheap; and time is your biggest asset at this point in your life.
I think it depends on how safe is he with somewhere to stay. Most parents won't kick you out as soon as you hit 18, mine would rather I stay with them for as long as possible while I sort things out(Though they would probably prefer I sit tight no matter the situation ha) It's just as likely that these opportunities will only exist later rather than sooner and the early bird leaves before the worm arrives. The people with vague motivations to take a couple years of basic courses and see what they like often end up late to the game when their peers are making connections, doing internships, and applying to professional schools.
Maybe the people who end up late to the game are the sort of people who can't be bothered making connections?
You're right, it certainly depends on the kind of person that OP is. I'm speaking from the perspective of someone who has seen plenty of friends and family fizzle out of school due to a lack of direction or motivation, so maybe I'm just sensitive to that possibility.
Why are you only able to go to STEM fields?
Just guessing - probably parents. If unique_username is not in North America, a lot of parents will send their kid to a North American university -- but only to STEM courses. I meet these kids all the time. Note: U-U, whatever you get into, continue to explore your creative side. Make time for it. If you don't it can come back and bite you -- often in the form of depression.