If you felt your life didn't turn out the way you expected

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I am going through this feeling right now. I am trying to finish studying computer science and I am struggling. Some years ago I thought I would be finished by now and have a good paying job, but I don't. My sister is in veterinary school and is successful. She has so much work experience and a good resume. I do have volunteering experience on my resume, but I have never had a job before and have been looking for one for the past four years. I am jealous of my sister.

Sometimes I feel I picked the wrong major because although it is interesting it does not reflect my real interests. But I get so much pressure from everyone. Everyone acts like I am going to be rich after school. Even my therapist would annoyingly encourage me to continue studying my major for the money aspect and would constantly bring it up in our sessions (part of the reason why I stopped seeing her). And it does not help that I highly dislike my university. I cry about this so many times and become suicidal. But I know I can not give up.

I am feeling horrible now. Any advice? If any of you ever felt at some point that your life didn't turn out the way you expected, what did you do to change it?

As someone who went through computer science and got a job in the field I understand how difficult it can be sometimes. I can tell you that no, a job is not assured (many times technical professions are looking for people with several years experience) and getting your foot in the door can be a chore in and of itself. That said if you are not satisfied with CS you need to ask yourself what it is you really do want to do for a living and follow that. Getting a degree just because of the potential money it will make you won't help if you end up hating your job.

You are correct. That is what I tell myself. The issue is I have to start thinking about my future. Especially since my parents are going to leave me living alone in a few more years.

How is it like working in the computer field anyway?

Keep in mind I work for a retail IT group so my experience may be a little different from say ye olde California based IT startup. Generally speaking I'm working on a number of projects at once be it doing coding or supervising contractors that code. I am a programmer analyst trying to reach SPA at this point so the whole communication skills thing is kind of being emphasized here (Which I personally suck at). I've gotten to work with a number of coding languages over the years including C, Visual Basic, .Net Framework, C#, PERL, and Java and learned how to do some very interesting things such as multi-threaded design. I wouldn't say it is a waste, but the corporate life of having my projects dictated by people who know nothing about software design does get grating at times.

You're right that it is about your future so you have to ask yourself this: Am I willing to put up with doing a job I may not like just for some extra cash? As long as you are making enough to survive and build something of a nest egg, you should be good. Having a job that you love to do will help immensely in the long run towards a more stable, less stressful life.

That sounds very interesting. You have gone very far. What is your opinion of computer science and the way it is taught at universities?

Stuff like programming interests me, but I do not feel much of a passion for it. I will do the programs and try really hard on them though. It is really upsetting when I try hard on one program and don't do well on it.

Well given that it's been 10 years since I was at university things may have changed at bit or not fit with what you are experiencing right now so keep that in mind. That said one of the most frustrating things about university was that what they taught really didn't help all that much compared to what I was actually asked to do in my job. They give you little programs here and there to do silly things like a bubble sort that generally speaking you will not be doing in a professional programming career (or if you do it will be a long ways down the line and you will have forgotten by then).

Usually you will be working with a team and have access to resources that are forbidden to you in college and that also is a disconnect between it and the real workplace. In an actual job you're not expected to know everything by rote memory. You're just expected to be able to put in the effort to research and make progress. Also because you will usually be doing something to everything in a given data set the usual algorithmic tricks they teach you to make things more efficient usually don't apply.

There are however three things I definitely suggest you try to learn if you're going to go into a computer programming career. The first is multi-threaded programming. This actually does help you make processing large data sets more efficient time-wise in that you will be able to fork off the processing in chunks to separate threads rather than doing it all in one autonomous process. I've actually used that knowledge several times in my career. The second thing is databases. Pick a database language be in Informix, Oracle, MySQL, etc and learn it as well as the principles behind databases and efficient query writing. Most of the time any kind of "weeding out" you do on a data set will be by pulling it through a database query these days. The third is service oriented architecture. It's all the rage these days what with all the Cloud hype so you're likely to run into it sooner rather than later and understanding and being able to code services and clients will help you in the long run.

I took an architecture course where we learned assembly language. Sad knowing we won't be using that anytime in the future. Data structures was the course that taught me a lot.

Thank you so much!

No problem, I wish you luck with your classes! To be fair there are certain situations where architectures can be useful. For instance I know of one program that uses an AVL tree to set up a directory read. It's just that it's very rare that you'll for instance necessarily be doing something like a bubble sort. In fact in some languages like Java they already have a sort function that you would use. The wonderful thing about abstraction is that things are much easier to do, the problem is you don't know all of the specifics going on behind the scenes of those function calls. that's part of why it's called computer science, it's not just actual programming that you're learning but the theoretical aspects of it as well.

Back at Michigan Tech we had the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, the four most obnoxious 4000 level course that had to be taken to get our bachelor's. They were Algorithms, Programming Languages, Intro to OS, and Team Software Project. Algorithms was a pain and mostly useless because it dealt with all that theoretical big O crap. Programming Languages turned out to be a joke for me because it was graded on a curve. Intro to OS was a pain because the teacher hadn't bothered to acknowledge that the students starting with my year were taught Java instead of basic C. Finally Team Software Project was a wash because one of my team members decided to coopt it for Enterprise project. Still, I got through it and landed a job. I still don't make as much as your usual Programmer Analyst though.

I am actually really good at Big O Analysis. That story of your Four Horsemen class sounds funny though. Good thing you got through.

My university has yet to teach us C. . . I mean, our computer science department is already a joke so I don't expect to learn it anytime soon. . . The chair is also lazy and never helps his students.

Oh this describes me to a "T" (but not the IT major).

What I did to change it? I couldn't, really, couldn't recoup the lost years, the ruined relationships. I picked myself up, dusted myself off, and started living again from the place where I found myself.

C is kind of becoming a sort of pointless language. Yes you can do a lot of low level programming in it, but what with languages like Java becoming almost as robust and easier to work with given good development tools a lot of the time you just don't want to deal with the issues C has like the obnoxious pointers, the lack of many helpful prepackaged functions, and the usually idiotically useless compiler errors. Yes, there are still programming languages like that in major use today such as COBOL for working with massive data sets that require extreme efficiency, but these days user friendliness is a major point in favor of a given language.

In any event if you can learn Java, learning C isn't too hard. You just have to deal with pointers and the fact you have very few helpful functions such as atoi to work with.