Parent of 2 sons, one graduated and one in college now. S1 attended a college which heavily emphasized experiential learning with internships year round. Wanted to work in science museums. Created his own major, which was part of the educational framework at this college. Interned at multiple museums on both coasts happily throughout college. While he taught himself to program in high school, he never considered CS as a potential major. His college didn’t even have a major in CS. In his senior year, aiming to fill an elective, he took his first formal programming course offered by a visiting professor. Well, that year his final internship was at this visiting professors’ start-up, and some years later, S1 is now a senior engineer at Microsoft. S2 absolutely devoted to physics in high school. Made a thoughtful search of Uni’s with programs in chemical physics. Chose an R1 mid size Uni with strong physics program. Took a linguistics course to fulfill a writing requirement as a first year and is now heading toward a career in speech recognition/natural language processing. No more chemical physics. He’s fortunate the school he chose coincidentally had a good linguistics program with a computational focus, otherwise I’m not sure where he would have landed. In both cases, these 2 discovered a focus in college which overturned what they thought were committed directions. I was utterly surprised in both cases, and glad they landed in environments where their changing interests could be so well accommodated.
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