<p>My HS Junior year officially ended last week (not living in the US). Now, I've got to start preparing for college life as early as next month. I'm going to be applying to the top 4 schools in the Philippines and see where I go from there. However I'm still not sure what to do with my life.</p>
<p>I love both technology and biology. Ever since elementary I've been fascinated by computers and the human body (this combination sounds wrong, eh?). I've been debating within myself whether I should major in Computer Science or do Pre-Med. I read somewhere online that I could somehow do both at the same time but exactly how is still not clear to me. I've also read that CS would deeply hurt my GPA and any chances of getting into Medical School, if I were to choose it. :/</p>
<p>I've still got all of summer vacation and my Senior year to decide. Life does go by fast, doesn't it? :/</p>
<p>You can major in computer science and still be pre-med (prepare for med school) as long as you take the required courses (eg. Organic chem, physics, biology, calculus). Taking CS may provide a good back-up option in case med-school is no longer feasible.</p>
<p>^That basically sums it up. The director of the emergency department at our university hospital started as a cs major, but then answered the call of medical school.</p>
<p>If you don’t have to declare a major when you apply for college take some intro classes in both and see which interests you more at a college level.</p>
<p>Medicine is a far more structured and stratified professional world than software development.</p>
<p>In medicine, what you do is driven by what you are. An otolaryngologist is authorized to diagnose tinnitus. A neurosurgeon is authorized to correct a spinal disc herniation. An anesthesiologist is authorized to sedate a patient. In software, What you “are” is just a way of describing what you’re good at doing and how you spend most of your time, or what work an employer usually assigns to you. There’s no such thing as a “database administrative license” or “systems architectural residency”. If you’re familiar with the database software a company uses (or better yet, wants to start using), you might be useful to that company as a database administrator. If you know how to set up a certain content management system and you’re comfortable with the language in which it’s written, you could be an independent contractor to a business that wants to start a unique website. You could even do that as a short-term side project and use the experience from that project to help you decide if you want to do more with the tools and techniques you used.</p>
<p>If you’re a podiatrist and you want to perform a root canal surgery on one person, you have to go back to school and go through years of residency to become a dentist, which means you become an expert on everything relating to teeth regardless of its usefulness in root canal surgery. If you’re a database administrator and you want to write a Chrome extension, you can jump right into development after reading some documentation. If you’re not comfortable with JavaScript or you don’t get something in the documentation, you can rapidly improve by fiddling with any number of scripts, searching Google, and asking around online. In the end, all that matters is that the extension works. Trial and error is actually extremely enjoyable and educational and it often leads to the conception of new technologies. You can’t learn what surgical tools do by experimenting with them in a patient’s mouth, at least if you want to correct that same patient’s root canal without causing injury.</p>
<p>What about the combination of computer science and medicine? You could work on medical imaging software, medical record databases, embedded software in devices like insulin pumps, etc. That doesn’t require a residency and you’ll probably get the most out of formal education if you spend that time studying math and computer science. Ten years from now, you’ll type code more often than you’ll interact with patients. It will serve you better to know the easiest or most efficient way to implement an algorithm (saving you many hours of work every week when all those little problems add up) than to know how the pancreas works (which helps you understand why the pump needs to output a certain amount of insulin that someone else decided it should output). Even if you research the body and design new technology, you’ll spend most of your time on minutiae despite applying most of your mental effort to concepts.</p>
<p>Actually, one of the best ways to prepare yourself for the future is to practice memory management. Pointers are to wannabe programmers as organic compounds are to wannabe doctors. The best low-level programmers use pointers in the cleanest, most intuitive manner.</p>
<p>Look into bioengineering, bioinformatics, and computational biology as possible career paths! These fields ARE the intersection between CS and bio.</p>