Programming/Computer Sci a good choice of career?

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SSJ4_PrestonGarvey
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19 Feb 2018, 5:09 pm

I want to go to university this fall but don't know what to take. My main area of interest is probably computers but I think programming is a highly competitive high pressure career. I think I may rule out the Video Game industry since it seems that they treat most of their staff really badly.

In terms of my personal interests Computer Science would be the best choice but I want to be sure to have a career that is realistic and suited to me. I need a pretty relaxed and laid back environment in order to do well. I can't handle intense demands/pressure well or being excessively micromanaged or an abusive working environment. I don't want to be replaceable at any minute of any day and be expected to worship the employer like they are God.

I find myself wondering if it might be better for me to choose a career outside of my main interests but has better working conditions, Unions, good job security, reasonably good pay. Biggest thing is being sure that a qualified position will be realistically available after I graduate, if I have to do entry jobs even after getting a Bachelor's Degree then I may not even earn enough to keep up on repaying the student loan.


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lambdamoses
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Joined: 19 Feb 2018
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25 Feb 2018, 12:04 am

If you're in the US, then you really don't have to choose a major in your freshman year. I work in bioinformatics, and I code a lot in R and C++ to analyze biomedical data, so I can kind of relate. I would say it can be stressful to debug code and still see errors (especially when the error message is cryptic or there's no error message at all and I just get the wrong results) in spite of hours of work. If you want to proceed to programming, then I think you should get better at stress management (though I think experimental research is much more stressful). I'm not discouraging you; it's possible to get better at stress management. Were I to do what I'm doing currently 10 years ago (I learnt C programming back then), I would definitely meltdown in this kind of situation, but not any more.

As I'm also a student, I can't say too much about employment. I work in an academic lab as a graduate student, and in spite of what many other graduate students said, I don't find graduate research in computational biology stressful, because my research field (with R programming and I love R!) is one of my special interests. I'm allowed to pace work on my own; I don't need to go to the office and can work whenever and wherever I want, as long as I get things done and give insightful explanations about my results. What I do is also very flexible; I propose the project and my faculty advisor is open to discuss problems with the project and how I may want to change its direction. So I'm pretty laid back. But the thing is, I need to get a good advisor which I do now but bad advisors exist. You will get a taste of it when you do undergraduate research.

I seriously consider computational biology a good career path. These days, as high throughput technology (such as genomics, transcriptomics, metabolomics, and etc.) are becoming more and more advanced and affordable, data is generated from biomedical research at an unprecedented rate. However, the major challenge is to make sense of the data. Since most biomedical researchers don't have computational backgrounds, they often use statistically unsound methods to analyze their data, and many of them can't do data analysis programmatically and are stuck with Excel (which is very inefficient when the problem gets just a little bit complicated). We really need more people who have both computational and biological backgrounds to make sense of the data.

Anyway, this is just my suggestion; it's up to you to decide. Graduate students and postdocs aren't paid a lot, but if you work for a hospital (yes, hospitals are also generating high throughput data; one of the goals of computational and systems biology these days is P4 medicine, which stands for predictive, preventive, personalized, and participatory medicine) or a biotech or pharmaceutical company, you might get pretty well paid. Furthermore, if you're not interested in biology, don't worry, since computational biology is really more computer science and math than biology and many computer science majors and physics majors are doing it.