<p>We won't know about CS related jobs with DS until his MS computer sci. internship is over. DS doesn't seem to be too concerned and says that he will start looking in earnest in February. He does not particularly like programming and wants to work with applications that uses computers. </p>
<p>Do not limit your DS in CS as a sole avenue. DS has a mechanical degree from CMU but uses programming and applications. He beat out many of CS candidates in his masters computer science program because his prof needed someone with a mechanical background for other cs projects</p>
<p>Interesting, thisoldman. It's seems there might be a whole lot of variety in what type of broader degree one could get & still work in computer science. </p>
<p>That was my concern, exactly -- that computer science was too narrow an area (particularly since this is a fairly recent interest of son's) around which to structure an entire college search. Just not sure where to go w/ the 'broader' view. He's good at math (won numerous 'top in school' awards when younger) but says he doesn't really "like" it (although went to college engineering camp & MIT camp). </p>
<p>That's why I'm leery of a technical school (Georgia Tech, etc.) since it seems narrower in a focus I'm not sure he's got clarified yet....</p>
<p>IMO, he is wise to consider a University with A&S as well as Engineering/Comp Sci. He can look at ECE (Electrical and Computer Engineering), CS, the various other Engineering programs, Physics and all of what the A&S departments have to offer.</p>
<p>Most Engineering programs have some sort of Engineering Overview course in the first year, exposing the kids to all of the disciplines, the type of research the profs are doing etc. A good way for him to see lots of options and what floats his boat.</p>
<p>If he starts out in Engineering/Comp Sci in such a school and decides it's not for him, it will be easy to switch over to a non-Engineering major. Not so easy to go the other way (ie, start out in A&S and try to switch into Engineering). And he wouldn't have to transfer out of the school, as he might if he goes to a Tech institute.</p>
<p>A reality check to keep in mind - at UCLA/UCSD, both with highly ranked CS programs, and I'm sure at many other colleges, there's about a 35-40% attrition rate of people switching out of CS. It's similar for some other engineering majors. There are several reasons for the switchouts including just not liking it, not wanting to do the level and amount of work required (a big one), and just not being able to do the work. It's important to consider other majors available at the college and ideally make sure there are some other backup majors, such as math and science as well as others, offered that look attractive.</p>
<p>Programmers(not management) in IB can make $100-$200,000 base and $20,000 - $150,000 in bonus, some even do better if they know more advanced programming language. IB also do not out source development work as much, because often rapid development/deployment is required. </p>
<p>You don't have to become a programmer just because you have a CS degree. My brother graduated from Cornell with a CS degree, he became a bond salesman. Whereas I have a math degree, never took a computer class in school, is an IT manager (I still can't program, but just very good at telling people how to do it).</p>
<p>Good programming skills are essential in any field these days. DS tells me about kids who hated their CS classes, but when they went to their sought-after bio internships, what did they do? Develop models and simulations for testing new drugs, etc.</p>
<p>DS was a CS/accounting major almost 25 years ago, then went to law school. Uses the systems analysis part of his training every day. Darned useful skill among a herd (flock, gaggle, pride) of lawyers! :)</p>
<p>S's friend who majors in CS at Brown, which is basically a liberal arts school, is being flown to the West Coast by Google, Apple, etc. for a job right out of college.</p>
<p>S, who is at a different college, wishes he'd taken more cs, and is taking his first course in object-oriented programing in JAVA as a senior. He's discovered a developing field called Scientific Computation, which is applying modelling skills to a wide variety of fields. Biology is one, though everything from cosmology to geoscience to finance to cryptography to fluid mechanics is using it. A cs-math major would be excellent preparation for that. Among the colleges that have programs in computational math/scientific computation are MIT, Stanford, Princeton, University of Washington, University of Md College Park, UT Austin, and NYU (Courant Institute) at the grad level. UCSan Diego and UC Davis are getting into it seriously as well.</p>
<p>Lesson: By the time your S graduates college, there will be new applications for cs out there.</p>
<p>Back around '02, the seemingly limitless tech bubble was bursting, fears of offshoring were surfacing, and my son was in the midst of a CS degree (@Carnegie Mellon). For my own sanity, and still unbeknown to my S, during a Parents Weekend I asked a CS prof, privately, if he though my S and his classmates were working hard on a degree that would be unmarketable. </p>
<p>He reassured me, talked about the cyclical nature and changeability of any field. He also suggested taking courses in non-CS field. As mathmom stated, CMU requires a minor in another subject. S ended up double majoring plus masters. The prof also told me the logic and problem solving skills involved in CS would be useful in any job.</p>
<p>A neighbor's S graduated from Loyola MD with IS/CS degree, has a good job in the Baltimore area. Loyola's a good school but I wouldn't think their CS dept would be close to UMD's, yet he's doing well.</p>
<p>The fastest outsourcing is happening, or has already happened, for simple programming work. For most industries where security is not a concern, they can get this done cheaply and very well overseas. However, most kids coming out of US college programs with CS degrees would not want these jobs anyway. The classic geek who has been programming all his life could certainly do this work after a year or two at college. From a place like CMU, many of the kids could do this work when they entered. </p>
<p>During the depths of the downturn I had a similar conversation with computer engineering prof at different top school. His, apparently well-rehearsed, answer, paraphrased, was "The diffusion of computers into our daily lives is just getting started. Over the next few years, and the next few decades, the biggest computer applications will be things that no one has thought of yet. Either because the supporting technology does not exist, or simply because it has never occurred to anyone. Years ago, try imaging a handheld device that did email (what's that), surfed the internet (what's that), offered GPS (what's that) and stored thousands of songs. Although the job market is much slower now than it was a few years ago, all of our graduates have multiple appealing offers in core computing fields, in addition to their options non-computing industries that need people with computer skills. Although the number of computer science majors at our university is down, enrollment in CS courses is up because computer skills have become so important that lots of students majoring in other things are learning CS as well."</p>
<p>I'm so grateful for these insights. Very helpful! </p>
<p>Son is adament that he doesn't want to be an engineer (but is looking at Drexel [in Philly] which has strong engineering & other science/math depts).</p>
<p>So it sounds like a school such as Georgia Tech might not offer a broad enough spectrum of other, non-CS, non-engineering majors to provide enough back-up options, if I'm understanding it correctly.</p>
<p>That piece of advice alone (if I have it right) is so valuable. I was going to drive 10+ hours to Georgia or cash in almost all of our freq flier miles to check it out (someone told me as NJ resident son might have the 'geographic diversity' tip for admissions there). Maybe not, now..!</p>
<p>At UCLA, UCSD, and many other colleges the CS department is part of the college of engineering so they're considered 'engineers' in that major at those colleges.</p>
<p>This website has salaries for all areas of engineering, and considers degrees, locations, experience. It will give you free information, but ultimately you need to buy something and
get locked out.</p>
<p>Before being locked out, I found it very accurate to salaries my child is getting offered.</p>
<p>Note that bigger companies pay more, and software engineers make the most (in the 90's).</p>
<p>More expensive cities have higher salaries.</p>
<p>My understanding is that the software engineers are the least lacking in social skills (just
from people in the industry - more introverted types), and work longer hours.</p>
<p>In my 20+ years of experience in software development, all for internal use or narrow vertical market applications, the most difficult part of delivering a business application is determining what to build. The communication between the designer or programmer, depending on the size of the effort, and the user or user community is the skill that consistentlly commands the highest salaries in general IT. Things may be different in "rocket science" areas like game programming or commercial applications (Windows, Word, etc.)</p>
<p>A broad liberal arts education with knowledge of computer programming and some business education (accounting and marketing) is the best preperation in my view. Naturally the individual has to like to tinker with/program to be good at it.</p>
<p>Today's NY Times had the latest Labor Department estimates on job growth here:</p>
<p>This list is a bit less heavy on computer jobs than last year's but if you weight the careers by salaries I think that computer careers will still look very good.</p>
<p>and please learn to write clearly if you are entering the field...that would make it easier on those of us who have to read specs and hope the next group are better at than we/I am/are.</p>
<p>Georgia Tech is a fantastic school, and it would be premature to rule it out on that basis alone. Check out just what it offers outside of CS and engineering before making a decision. I know it only by reputation, but I thought they had quite a bit of choice in social sciences, as well as a pretty good set of humanities, which are required for engineering degrees. It is not for everyone, but it is so good in CS, it is important to make an informed decision.</p>
<p>You can also go to an LAC to major in CS, then on to university. My D's b.f.
graduated with double major in CS and East Asian Studies from Oberlin, then on to a PhD program in CS at Brown University. As an undergraduate, he very much wanted contact with other majors and ways of thinking, so the LAC was very much the right choice for him. While an undergraduate, he won a Goldwater award as a junior, published a paper as a senior and traveled to read it at a professional conference, and took summer internships in the area of running computer models for medical research in genetics. </p>
<p>As he explained it to me very patiently (I'm the one they wrote "computers for dummies' for..) the medical researchers can't run enough labs so ask the CS people to design and run mathematical models to get results "as if" all these labs had occurred. On this medical internship, he liked feeling this work explored genetics towards a cure someday, BUT the actual work was dull for him, lots of waiting around to run these programs. He's always in search of projects that are exciting to him intellectually. My explanations of all this are clunky because I don't really understand his field, but I like this individual.</p>
<p>A big decision during grad school in CS is whether to stay with it to the PhD or jump ship sooner for a job in industry. </p>
<p>He always works very hard. It's a serious endeavor. He really is a scientist. </p>
<p>At times I got the sense that he missed research options because of being at an LAC rather than a university as an undergraduate, and it might have inhibited how many grad schools he got into. On the other hand, the publishing was unusual and exciting. And for him, he absolutely needed to satisfy his own intellectual goals by the double major with East Asian studies, plus making friends with so many other majors in Social Sciences and Humanities. </p>
<p>To me, he is a very interesting person to talk to on ANY subject, and absolute sponge for knowledge in any area. Cooks a good stir-fry, too.</p>
<p>mathmom, where did you get that CMU figure?? According to their CDC web site CMU computer science grads mean and median salaries were $69,985 and $71,750 respecitvely in 2007. Minimum salary offer was $42,000 and the maximum salary offer was $86,000, or $4,000 less than the average salary you cited. These are nevertheless very good starting salaries. At our son's college mean CS salaries were $62,506, about $7500 less which is reasonable considering the very high calibre of CMU CSC students from top to bottom.</p>
<p>Another thing to consider re CS graduates is that there has been a significant decline in the number of students choosing the major since the peak year. The number of CS graduates declined to 48, 069(about 13%) in 2004(the last year of data I could find) from the peak a few years earlier. I suspect that a significant reason for this decline is the publicity outsourcing has seen in the msm. The number of new CS grads is far below industry needs according the the USBLS. Accordingly salary increases for recent graduates have been accelerating since 2001.</p>
<p>
[quote]
So it sounds like a school such as Georgia Tech might not offer a broad enough spectrum of other, non-CS, non-engineering majors to provide enough back-up options, if I'm understanding it correctly.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>You know, top tech schools offer plenty of non-engineering majors. Sometimes their non-engineering majors are among the best in the country for that field. Georgia Tech, for instance, offers majors in architecture, city planning, economics, international affairs, management, physics, math, bio, psychology, chemistry, and public policy, among others.</p>
<p>Average is almost $70,000 and median is $73,000 according to this link. (Interesting that this is a little higher than the number you found.) BTW that low starting salary of $32,000 was a kid who wanted to go back to his small town in Idaho and the only placement he could find was as a high school teacher.</p>
<p>My recollection was that salaries at RPI were about $10,000 less than CMU and WPI a little bit lower than that. But they were all still quite high I thought. (And their numbers might not have been just CS students.)</p>
<p>Computer science departments shrank sharply when the internet bubble popped. I know Harvard's reduced by at least a third. </p>
<p>At any rate the point remains. It's a well paying field and looks like a fairly safe bet.</p>