<p>I dont think anyone is saying making money is bad for its own sake, but rather the best way to make a bunch of money is to do something you enjoy. This way you'll do it exremely well and will find a way to make money.</p>
<p>If you're really only interested in making money dont go to college. Save that $20,000 dollar investment(much more if you're OOS or going to a private)and go buy a franchise or something.</p>
<p>"a CS degree weak yeah, um did ya know its considered the 2nd hardest major just under EE. "</p>
<p>I think a math major might come first.</p>
<p>no, it doesnt cs is the same as a math major it is just a applied math major, and I am a math major with CS and Math is alot easier than dealing with 500mb of freebsd code and trying to find a error that takes 20 hours.,</p>
<p>math is pretty low on the list, physics is harder and well as every other type of engineering.</p>
<p>One would think that theoretical math would pose more difficulty than applied math. How far along are you in your major?</p>
<p>I'll agree that math is considered an easier major than most engineering. </p>
<p>Anyways, a CS major is not weak in any sense (unless you live in an area where high-tech is nonexistent). Your starting salary out of college will be extremely high compared to the rest of your peers. However, your room for advancement and raises is somewhat low, as you're considered a worker more than a potential leader...aka you've pretty much hit the asian glass ceiling, even if you're not asian.</p>
<p>Econ/CS or Business/CS or just Engineering/Econ double majors tend to do extremely well in the business world since they have two sets of valuable skills.</p>
<p>Yeah.. I used to try to make myself like engineering too for the money, but I realized that even though you'll be making the most right after you graduate, that's probably going to be your salary for the rest of your life, maybe with some raise, unless you go to grad school or something. And grad school is even harder, so make sure you like it, and then you'll probably end up doing that your whole life, and if you don't like it, it might be too late to pursue your true interest. I used to think that I could just do my interests on the side and make money w/ engineering, but engineering really took up way too much time. Plus, in the end, you'll have some money as long as you work, and some free time to enjoy life, instead of working for other people who are enjoying their lives, while you make software for them or something. and i don't think any one major can simply just make a person rich. it really depends on that individual.</p>
<p>^thank you. well said.</p>
<p>CS has math?! Man that sucks, so instead of studying CS I think I'd rather play CS....</p>
<p>Oh and I have a relative who did a CS who did it w/o knowing what it was and said he hated his job at first but he was luck and got to liking it later.</p>
<p>The CS at my school doesn't have math...</p>
<p>A lot of these technical skills can be easily oustourced...don't outsmart yourself.</p>
<p>To make money in slim-picking fields requires ingenuity.</p>
<p>Market your talents, break into or start an industry in your field.</p>
<p>Good at biology? Work at a big pharma, do a startup, or go into ecological/corporate/biotech consulting.</p>
<p>Good at CS? Get a job as an IT Manager (90k median salar, 120k+ at some banks), start your own offshore contract software development company, or work freelance for 60-200$ an hour. Or, if you're hot ****, start your own software consulting solutions company. </p>
<p>How about chemistry? Don't study some obscure organic chemistry mechanism - go into biochemistry and work your way in pharma & consulting.</p>
<p>ANddddd...</p>
<p>Don't flake on the math: get at least a minor in math no matter what field you study. Math opens up so many backup quantitative opportunities, in i-banking, consulting, etc etc. </p>
<p>This is obviously geared towards science and engineering... If you're majoring in liberal arts you deserve to be poor. :) just kidding but mildly serious</p>
<p>The following logic train enlightened me, i am majoring in biology: </p>
<p>Let's assume I wanted to be a great surgeon that makes $400,000/year, which is pretty usual.</p>
<p>My school cost 45,000$ a year.
Pre-professional school costs between $20k-$30k+ a year.
Assuming i went med, I would need 6 years of medical school, 4 for general and 2 to specialize.
After that, I would need to be at a residency for at least 3 years, making around $40k/year if i got a great one.
After that, I would get hired by some hospital where I would be a lowly surgeon in training under an experienced surgeon. Depending on what type of surgery I wanted to go into, this could last from 3-10 years. I would compare it to the road to tenure. </p>
<p>So thats:
-(4)(45k)-(6)(25k)+(40k)(3)+(60-100k)(3-10) (lets assume i made 80k)
so I owe/paid $330,000
so I made $360,000-$920,000</p>
<p>and at this point, i would be 31-38 years old. Past this age, I would make
400k+ a year, and live happily ever after.</p>
<p>Or..........</p>
<p>I could go to graduate school, and get PAID to learn for 27k+ a year...</p>
<p>And then get a PhD, where I could then enter an industry job for 120k minimum...</p>
<p>Where, assuming I was good, eventually become lab manager or have the experience to make my own startup, where 400k would be very quickly dwarfed.</p>
<p>I think it seems more risky to travel off the yellow brick road, but do you really want to have a boring and unpredictable life?</p>
<p>how could it not have math, I cant imagine CS without calculus, how could possibly determine runtime or the runtime of mass computations.</p>
<p>Yeah, I can't imagine CS without math. Compiler construction, analysis of algorithms, and digital logic all get thrown out the window without it.</p>
<p>comp sci a weak major? lol</p>
<p>
[quote]
but do you really want to have a boring and unpredictable life?
[/quote]
What are you talking about? Because you know you are in school? Life is never predictable. (assuming you had a typo)</p>
<p>
[quote]
not, be really good, get into Microsoft/Yahoo!/HP/etc, and after 5 years when you cash in on your stock options you'll be a millionnaire.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Well, I don't know about that, especially regarding Microsoft. Let's face it. Not too many new employees at Microsoft have been getting rich in the last 5years, as Microsoft stock has basically just tread water during that time. Speaking with regards to HP or Microsoft, these aren't growth stocks, and haven't been for awhile, as these are already very large and well established companies, and that basically means that there isn't much opportunity to get rich quickly as a regular employee anymore. Sure, if you had joined Microsoft in the 80's or even the early 90's, sure, you would have become rich. But now? I don't think so. Microsoft is already the largest software company in the world, by far, with about $50 bn of annual revenue and $300 bn of market cap. That's big. How much bigger do you think it's really going to get? Similarly, HP has $94 bn of annual revenue and about $120 bn of market cap. That's big. Again - how much bigger do you really think HP can really get? </p>
<p>Yahoo might be different because Yahoo might still have strong growth ahead of it in the future. But again, Yahoo is a well established and quite large (by Internet standards) firm. While I can see that Yahoo might get bigger, it's hard for me to see how it could get several times bigger in a short period of time. </p>
<p>I think what you REALLY mean to say is to join some small tech company that has hypergrowth potential, such that it can really can expand by 5 or 10 times in a few years. That, I agree, is a company that will make you rich. Of course the trick is to find that company.</p>
<p>
[quote]
I could go to graduate school, and get PAID to learn for 27k+ a year...</p>
<p>And then get a PhD, where I could then enter an industry job for 120k minimum...
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Uh, exactly which jobs out there pay 120k minimum for PhD's? Even the EECS PhD's from MIT in 2006 only got paid about 111.5k per year on average. The only PhD's from MIT who, on average, made more than 120k were the Sloan management PhD's and the operations research PhD's (which is a cousin of a Sloan management PhD). But Sloan management PhD's tend to have significant work experience, so it's not really a fair comparison.</p>
<p>I believe you have also neglected that you're never guaranteed to get a PhD. In the case of the med school process, the most difficult step is simply getting admitted to med school. But once you're in, then as long as you do the work, you're not going to flunk out. In contrast, plenty of people (probably over half) who enter PhD programs do not complete them. Some people fail their General Exams. Others are simply unable to complete their thesis. </p>
<p>Hence, there is a significant chance that you will spend years trying to get a PhD and never get it. Granted, you can probably get a consolation master's degree, but that's not exactly the same thing.</p>