<p>It'll depend on the college but a lot of them will want one to declare the specific engineering major up front. Engineering majors have a lot of required courses compared to some other majors and so they tend to start right in with the specific engineering courses right away. For example, a CS major will likely start taking some CS programming classes the first quarter/semester. Given that, it's not unusual to change majors shortly after starting since some students find they didn't really like a particular major as much as they thought they would or simply found something else more interesting.</p>
<p>In CS there are many paths one can take. Some will go the IT route but many won't. A lot will end up in application design and development which often isn't a part of an IT group (which is usually more infrastructure and application integration than development). A CS grad might do application development (think any program you run on your computer or other people or businesses run), develop statistical analysis and other applications for the financial and business world, work in the area of bioinformatics to help develop new drugs and therapies, work more in the imbedded area where they develop applications that run on appliances, cruise missiles, cable boxes, etc., work in developing computer games, intelligence analysis, imaging applications (like Google Earth, face recognition, etc.), and the list keeps going. It's really across the board. In addition to design/development work, a CS major might go into a project lead position, coordinate various groups, end up going up the management chain, etc. </p>
<p>Job prospects seem to be very good for CS majors right now hence the high starting salaries. Most industry leaders state that we're not producing nearly enough CS majors as well as certain other engineers. Outsourced - there'll be some outsourcing of various jobs - especially the more 'production level' aspects such as some IT functions and some application maintenance functions. Regardless, there seem to be plenty of jobs available here. Starting salaries for CS majors seem to be between roughly $55K-$80K with $60K-$70K being more typical and with some outliers to those.</p>
<p>ucsd-ucla-dad:
To do all the exciting things you mention in paragraph 2 of your response (not the IT job) would that be a basic "computer science" major or something more specific?
I have to go back on some of the college major websites where seems to be so many options and I don't know how to help direct my son.
Thanks for your help. My husband and I are in non-computer fields so we really need help from others.</p>
<p>Don't get me wrong - IT jobs can be exciting as well. Some of the IT people I know have managed to travel the world performing their jobs and have found them challenging.</p>
<p>To do all of the things I mentioned above (and a whole lot more) a degree in Computer Science (CS) or variants like Computer Engineering, EECS, and others is considered a starting point. Think of these grads as coming out and being presented with many possible paths to follow. It's up to them to decide which path they want to take. Once they head down a path they can even hop to different paths if they want to. Sometimes grads from other majors like math and physics end up in CS as well although a CS grad usually has the skills to hit the ground running.</p>
<p>To get more of an idea of the types of companies hiring and the types of jobs available take a look at the career centers of some colleges. Carnegie Mellon has some useful info as does UCLA and many others.</p>
<p>Here's a list of some of the companies at a UCLA engineering career fair. You can go to the companies' websites to see what they do although you'll recognize many of them - UCLA</a> Career Center</p>
<p>Note employers as diverse as Dreamworks entertainment (lots of movie special effects), the Air Force Flight Test Center, LA Dept of public works, HSBC, Intel, Microsoft, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Price Waterhouse Coopers, Procter and Gamble, Walt Disney Imagineering, Yahoo, Zurich American Insurance, and many more.</p>
<p>You can PM me if there are an more questions you might have that I might be able to help with.</p>
<p>Another area of software engineering is done at companies like Apple, Oracle, IBM, Sun, Tibco, and Microsoft where the programmer is put to work building the software foundations that other developers use to build applications. Examples would include Databases, Operating Systems, Application Servers, Software Development Environments and GUIs Toolkits. For those who are interested this can be a very lucrative and challenging area. </p>
<p>I was a developer of applications for a phone company that has now moved over and am working for a company in this area.</p>
<p>This is traditional software engineering work where you get to put to work all of the math and analysis learned in the upper level classes. Don't forget Microsoft and other operating system companies. Of please don't forget the open source companies.</p>
<p>I think that it can be a waste of talent to go into IT but there are lots of IT jobs that pay very well and that are very interesting. As several have said, the CS major provides a lot of useful skills and experiences and these can be useful in many areas, even if they result in more than required for many jobs.</p>