<p>I'm a 1st year at UChicago right now and I am currently planning on majoring in math. I plan on taking plenty of comp sci classes, but with simultaneous interests in math and English, majoring in comp sci would nearly completely occupy the rest of my available courses until I graduate.</p>
<p>Is it significantly more difficult to enter the tech industry, Palo Alto/Silicon Valley/Google sort of stuff, as a math major than as a computer science major? </p>
<p>I don't really know what I want to do when I graduate yet but these sort of opportunities have always seemed interesting and exciting to me. It seems like majoring in math most effectively sets me up for either graduate work or finance work, neither of which has captured my imagination at this point.</p>
<p>If you take fewer CS courses than a CS major takes, you can optimize your CS course selection for industry software jobs by choosing the following:</p>
<ul>
<li>Introductory sequence (as prerequisites)</li>
<li>Algorithms and complexity</li>
<li>As many of these as you can take: operating systems, networks, databases</li>
</ul>
<p>What UCBAlumnus said is true. If you select your CS courses to focus on more “information science/systems” software, then you would have almost the same chance as a regular CS major for jobs.</p>
<p>The courses that UCBAlumnus posted are the key courses.</p>
<p>I did exactly what you are planning on doing – Applied Math specializing in computing. Just make sure to tailor your math courses with some courses in programming, algorithms, numerical methods, etc. Probability theory and combinatorics as math courses are good options since they lend themselves to many fields in computer science.</p>
<p>I have had a good career as a software engineer and haven’t had any issues finding good jobs in the field without a software engineer. My current employer mentioned he prefers hiring math majors who can program and have software engineering background rather than hiring CS majors since in general his math major employees have been much more effective for him overall.</p>