Advice About Future Career Choices

Parents Forum
1

<p>I'm currently a college junior. I will be getting a degree in Computer Science in a year and I may be minoring in Chinese. Last summer, I worked an internship for a software company and have since determined that I'd prefer not do software work (although I will if I can't get any other jobs). I enjoy learning languages and I'm taking multiple at the moment (French, Japanese, Chinese). I would prefer a career that could make use of my foreign language skills, and preferably one that would take me abroad.</p>

<p>So a rundown of languages I know:
- Chinese: I can speak it with native fluency and read newspapers and some modern literature. I don't write that well though. I've taken two semesters of it in college so far and I would like to take more, but that depends on availability of classes.
- French: I took this for five years during middle/high school and then two semesters in college. I'm certainly not fluent, although I'd like to study abroad and increase my fluency.
- Japanese isn't worth mentioning since I'm just taking the intro class now for fun.</p>

<p>I'll be finishing all of my CS requirements at the end of this school year, so I could technically graduate, but I think I'll use my last year to study abroad instead. My options are either France or China (or both), and I haven't quite decided yet.</p>

<p>I've been looking and like the idea of working for the NSA/various other intel services with my language skills. They seem to want to hire people who speak/read/write Mandarin Chinese, all of which I can do (although with some room for improvement on the reading/writing). They have an internship program that I want to apply to after my senior year.</p>

<p>I'm curious though -- (1) How competitive are the language internships? My overall GPA is not particularly great due to CS (3.0), don't know if they care about that.
(2) Would the security clearance would pose a problem? I'm a US citizen, but a naturalized one. Both my parents are also naturalized citizens, but my grandparents (the ones who are alive) aren't. Does the background check go that far and/or do they care?
(3) Finally, I want to study abroad my senior year, possibly in France and/or China. The problem: do I need to be in the US during the application process?</p>

<p>I've also considered the Foreign Service -- and this would be great, except that the FSO exam looks hard, so I'd need lots of backup options. Would it be any easier if I went the Foreign Service Specialist route for IT? The problem is that most of my experience is in software dev and not IT, and their hiring cycles seem pretty sporadic.</p>

<p>Anyone have experience/know people who have worked in jobs related to anything I've mentioned above? </p>

<p>Thanks!</p>

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<p>I can’t answer your real questions but I did want to say that possibly you are generalizing too much from your internship? How did you feel about your career path before the internship? Might it be possible to post your experience in the CC engineering forum to get more insights to make sure you are basing your decision on enough data points? I know nothing of the possible jobs with a CS degree, so I may be way off base, but in the occupations I know well there is too much variability to know a career path from having had one internship.</p>

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<p>I basically spent the entire summer thinking about this. :(</p>

<p>When I first went to college, I had a lot of interests ranging from art to CS to linguistics to politics, all of which could’ve been potential majors. I choose CS largely because my parents approved and I certainly enjoyed it at the time. My dad also works in software dev – he started at a series of startups and then moved to a big company, so in some sense I knew what to expect from industry. But over time I’ve just found myself less and less interested in coding. I’ve grown annoyed at the lack of contact with humans, so I’d like to explore careers related to my other interests instead.</p>

<p>I don’t know if it sounds too idealistic, but I’d greatly prefer a job that either (1) has an international component to it, hence why I was looking into the foreign service or (2) lets me interact with humans more… </p>

<p>Ideally, of course, it would be both!</p>

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<p>My brother had a computer leasing business (not exactly what you’re studying but he knew a lot about computers) and he was always good with languages (fluent in French, Spanish, German, then taught himself Japanese). He applied for a translating job with the FBI. Clearance took 1.5 years. Now he works for them, overseas, as a translator.</p>

<p>Not exactly an answer, but I think there are several pathways you could pursue. You could try for this kind of job after graduation, or you could work first then apply for one of these type of jobs.</p>

<p>Good luck.</p>