I’m a A average student who doesn’t know what he wants to do with his life… I got a 5 on the APUSH exam and have a 99 in AP US Gov currently. I love politics and public policy. I also enjoy math and computers. I come from an engineering and lawyer family, so financial stability is also very important to me. I plan on double majoring in college, but cannot decide what options I should consider.
Some of the majors I have been looking at are…
Public Policy
Data Science
Industrial Engineering
Political Science
Mathematics
Statistics
Political Science
Science, Technology, and Policy
Economics
Are any of these combinations better than others? What are the job prospects with some of these combinations? What kind of job prospects would I have?
There are a lot of good choices there. You don’t have to decide to double major right away as you could decide to add one or two of these subjects as minors instead. Or just major in one subject and take various classes in these other areas. It is harder to double major across colleges ex. Poli sci and engineering.
Data science isn’t a widespread major - it’s offered at some colleges (typically ones with a more technical bent).
Quantitative majors like mathematics, data science, statistics, industrial engineering, and to a certain extent economics have more direct routes into certain types of careers. The careers that ask for those skills also tend to pay higher salaries on average. Statistics and data science, in particular, are in-demand skills across many fields because of the proliferation of data these days. You can take a background in math or stats or IE, for example, and apply it to public policy or politics (e.g., analyzing political data as an analyst, or economic modeling for a government agency or NGO, or working in the government relations arm of a bank or investment firm, or working with the public sector arm of a tech company, etc.)
On the other hand, all of the social science majors you listed have significant mathematical applications within them. Political science can get pretty quantitative if you want it to, and there are some universities that offer integrated programs in political science and math or political science and statistics (like Columbia). Public policy also has a lot of statistical applications, and obviously economics is very quantitative. A math/stats major combined with one of those can be a pretty useful and interesting combination.
I suggest that you take a couple of classes in each of these fields in college (start the calculus sequence in your first semester if you can, as that takes three semesters to finish and the earlier you finish the faster you can get into upper-level classes. You’ll need it for the majority of the majors, and all of the quant ones). Then you can make a choice later.
In addition to sampling majors during your first year or two of college, you may be able to find lectures and sample classes on sites like Coursera and EdX.