Computer Science, Biology, and Business--Majors

I want to do Computer Science, Biology, and Business in college. I’m not sure if I should major in Computer Science and minor in biology and business, or double major in Computer Science and Biology and forego Business–I don’t know what to do. If anyone knows someone who has done this before or if you have done something similar, what did you do? And even if you haven’t, what do you recommend?

Also, I’ve been researching good colleges to apply to for these subjects, and I want to go to a middle-sized school, but a lot of the schools that I’m finding seem to be reaches for me (like Johns Hopkins). What colleges do you recommend looking at?

Well, it depends on what you want to do and what you mainly want to study.

Do you want to be a software developer for a biotech firm with an eye towards management?
Do you want to be a manager or marketing specialist at a pharmaceutical company?
Do you want to be a bioinformaticist with an academic medical center?

I mean, I’m just throwing out careers there, but what you want to do and which skills are necessary for that really will determine what you major and minor in. If you want to do things that are more computer scienc-y (software developing, informatics, so writing code, talking tech, etc.) then you’ll need a computer science major moreso. If you want to emphasize the biology side while using tools from CS to get done what you want to get done, then major in biology. I’m not a huge fan of business majors in general so I think you should pick one or both of the other two and maybe just take some business classes - but if you’re more interested in the management or business side of a biological/biomedical or biotech/technology company, then business with a side of CS and bio might be your best bet.

OR OR OR. If you are at a college that allows you to design your own major (which is most of them!!) you could design a major that blends together the best elements of CS and biology - call it computational biology or bioinformatics - and then minor in or take classes in business.

Incidentally, there are a few colleges with a major in computational biology or bioinformatics. Harvey Mudd, Wash U, Cornell, Carnegie Mellon, Boston College, WPI, and USC all offer computational biology majors or tracks within their biology majors. Brigham Young, Loyola Chicago, University of Pittsburgh, Davidson College, Hunter College, and several other public universities offer a major in bioinformatics.

Also, there is a difference between computational biology and bioinformatics. Bioinformatics is more about the engineering side, about creating tools to work on biological data. Computational biology is about using computational techniques to study biology, and it’s more on the science side.

@juillet

Thank you so much for taking the time to respond!!

I’m not sure if I’m leaning more towards science or more towards computer science yet–I want to take more classes in both before I choose bioinformatics or computational biology. Then along with those classes, I may take a few classes in business just in case they will be useful in some way.

Should I still declare a major/minor when I enter a college (so declare computer science as my major and biology as my minor)? And then after the first year, if I’m better at biology than computer science, either switch to a bio major and computer science minor or enter a computational biology program, or if I’m sure about wanting to go more into the computer science side enter a bioinformatics program? Or enter a bioinformatics program straight from the start and switch stuff around somehow if I realize that I would rather do computational biology?