I was looking for some advice and insight regarding informatics majors. I am a first year student at UC Riverside and I am currently a bio major. However, I am thinking about switching majors from biology to business informatics because I don’t plan on going to med school. I am also worried about graduating with a low GPA. I have been doing my own research but I was looking for more input, opinions, and articles regarding the success of graduates with informatic degrees. Assuming I graduate with a BS in business informatics, could I find a decently paying job quickly? Pros and cons as well as other opinions would be great!
Informatics is a pretty booming field right now - it’s the science of computer information systems, or how to manage, process, and analyze large amounts of information or data using computers. Given that most companies are simply inundated with data and are salivating to monetize that data (predicting what people are going to buy! analyzing which people are most likely to become new customers! finding out the exact best time to run an expensive ad!), informatics is a hot field right now.
However, no major in and of itself results in finding a decently paying job quickly. You have to have the skills and experiences companies want:
-Learn to use SQL, like, tomorrow.
-Take statistics classes. Informatics is kind of useless without the statistics.
-Learn programming languages. Which ones are best is going to depend on your industry of choice.
-Do summer internships!
-If you can work part-time during the school year in the field, try that too.
-If your college has some CS-related orgs - like an app development club, or a data science incubator or something - get involved in one of those, too.