I’m in the right field
One of the major take-home lessons from the Career Fair at University of Maryland over the previous two days is: I’m in the right field. It was a general career fair for the whole campus, but, I would estimate, a full one-third of the employers there were looking for (or could use) computer science majors. It was the most sought-after major at the entire fair. The second most-wanted major was engineering.
What to glean from this? Well, we are in the age of the computer. Yes, the dot-com bubble did burst, but it’s not as if it suddenly made computers bad tools. Each year that goes by sees computers used more than ever before in the business world. Every medium-sized company or larger out there needs computer science people. They need IT workers. They need people to develop their internal applications. It’s not just software companies that need programmers anymore. It’s every company. I definitely got the feeling that I was in demand at the Career Fair; people’s eyes seemed to light up when I mentioned that I was graduating with a degree in Computer Science. I already have many interviews lined up and I’ve worked my way to the second level of interviewing with a couple big corporations that you’ve definitely heard of.
So, my advice to anyone going to college soon or just starting off college is this: consider a career in computer science. Unlike, say, a Psychology major, you will be in high demand for the skills that you picked up at college. Real-world programming experience makes for a great resume line-item. The prospective employers I talked with were impressed that I have open source development experience, significant Java development experience working in a group, and that I have three years professional software development experience in Microsoft Visual Studio (sorry, looks like I haven’t blogged this one yet).
One thing that confuses me is that the number of computer science majors graduating per year peaked just after the dot-com bubble, back when it was still “sexy” or the “hot thing”. Since then, the number of computer science majors has gone down significantly, yet the number of job openings in the field has only continued to increase year-after-year. Computers aren’t a fad. They’re now a permanent and important part of how every business works. It’s ludicrous that people were turned off from computer science by the bubble, but the truth is, computer scientists are needed now more than ever before.
March 8th, 2007 at 15:55
What you fail to realize is that all the Philosophy and English majors don’t even have to go to the career fair, because they all have huge lines of company recruiters following them around begging to give them a job.
March 9th, 2007 at 15:05
Damn, I should have stuck with computer science. Due to bad advice from my school-assigned advisor, I switched my major to Japanese.
March 9th, 2007 at 17:05
Ouch … Japanese? That’s not quite as marketable as computer science. Hrrmmm. Do you remember the advice you got from your adviser that caused you to drop computer science? Were it me, I probably would’ve double-majored in computer science and Japanese. It’s easy to pair those two together as they require totally different skills, so you can go from working on one to working on the other and not burn out versus, say, trying to double major in astronomy and physics, which are largely the same kinds of things.