Making Money vs. Making People Happy

College Majors Engineering Majors
1

Hi everyone,
I have the daunting task of continuing my engineering college career but to be honest, I think it’s taking a toll on my mental health. I am under Computer Science and the math classes are easy but I struggle in simple programming. I don’t really understand the material so it takes me hours to make simple modular programs in Python (including creating an algorithm, pseudocode, and flowchart) and I had to skip a class in order to finish it. I so far have all A’s but a B in Intro to Programming which is steadily declining. I would say I’m decent, not some Einstein in math or Gates in programming so it might be hard for me to compete with other better programmers, like I can’t debug very well and I always ask for my dad’s help
Why I want to keep this

  • huge payout in the end
  • I have connections
  • stable job
  • easy to find internships for experience
  • I’m a girl

I drove by the CHOC Hospital today and I thought to myself, this is where I want to work, it’s a beautiful building great things are being done, and I naturally gravitate towards doing volunteer work (+400 hours in high school) but I don’t want to go through the pain of Med School as I know it is very competitive. I thought about being a nurse but I would be approximately be 1 year behind.
Why I am hesitant

  • very competitive in my school
  • job pay is not great, even if it is, I’d have to be in the field for quite some time
  • I have no connections
  • I’m behind in classes
  • none of my classes can be transferred towards the nursing major

So I’d like to ask, should I tough it out and wait 5 years before something magical happens or bite the bullet and be satisfied with making people happy vs. a well paying job. (I was in private school up until college so I feel like I’d let my parents down if I make less than they do)

2

Have you considered other engineering disciplines?

3

You can do things with an STEM degree that help make people happy! The difference might be that you don’t engage with those people day to day. But you can work in things like medical device manufacturing, programming for driverless cars (believe me, that would make my parents, who are elderly and close to losing their licenses very happy!), etc. Or CS might not be your passion – is there some other major offered at your school that you are doing okay in? My D2 goes to an engineering-type school, too. She was in CS for a while, but ended up switching to Physics because she really likes it.

I wouldn’t worry too much about how you make compared to your parents. As long as YOU can cover your expenses and lead a fulfilled life, that is far more important. As a parent who paid for private K-12 for my kids, believe me, it wasn’t so they would make a lot of money.

Regarding the programming, it probably is frustrating if you didn’t program much before. And a LOT of tech school students (especially the guys) mucked around with programming for a lot of their teenage years, which can make you feel inferior to them. And some of 'em are quite brash about telling everyone how good they are. Don’t let this get you down!!

4

Even staying in computer science you can direct your career toward more philanthropic ventures. Shoot, the medical field uses a lot of computers, all of which need to be designed and programmed. You wouldn’t be directly with a patient, but it might work for you.

5

Helping people in the medical area is not necessarily limited to physician (or other patient contact roles like nurse, physical therapist, etc.). For example:

Civil engineers design clean water infrastructure to reduce water-borne diseases (most need is in poor countries).
Chemical engineers design processes to make medicines more efficiently and cheaply.
Computer scientists and engineers write software that is used everywhere.
Electrical and mechanical engineers design medical instruments and prosthetics.
Industrial engineers design processes to make various complex tasks more efficient.
Materials engineers design materials that can be used in medical applications.
Nuclear engineers design radiological devices that can be used in medical applications.

6

" I can’t debug very well and I always ask for my dad’s help" - Are you living at home?

It would be better to ask from help from you classmates or a TA. They will be more in tune with class requirements, and it would be good collaboration experience.

7

I help my D2 debug sometimes. :slight_smile:

8

Plenty of engineers work in healthcare. If you’re lacking in hard engineering skills, healthcare consulting might be an excellent field for you and actively seeks engineers.

9

I recommend looking at biomedical
Engineering or orthotist / prosthetics . Both give you the opportunity to help people and your math skills would be a great asset.

10

Flowcharts and pseudocode? I thought that stuff died out by 1990. Find another school.

Nurses make decent money. Seems to me if you don’t like programming or engineering, nursing would be perfectly fine to go into. People change their majors all the time and end up going an extra year. In the grand scheme of things, adding an extra year in school is a price worth paying for a career you like.

11

Sorry, I work in IT, and flowchart are still useful communications tools sometimes.

12

It sounds like you don’t really like programming so maybe a change of major is called for. As others have stated, there are a lot of STEM majors which are very fulfilling but you have to find the one that really keeps you interested. Spend a bit of time thinking about this and then talk to your advisor.

13

One of the up and coming areas in rehab is designing computer based programs similar to the X box kinect or Wii U to assist is the recovery of strokes, spinal
Cord injuries , orthopedic injuries or developing hands free communication
devices for people with strokes, MS and ALS or artificial limbs that are "robotic "
In nature. What in trying to say is you have great options, you just need to get through the preliminary courses to realize them.

14

This is so wrong. If you don’t like it, it doesn’t matter what you study. There is no guarantee CS will make money. Seriously go study something you like. It’s not a good idea to study CS when you even struggle at the first assignment.

15

This is so wrong. If you don’t like it, it doesn’t matter what you study. There is no guarantee CS will make money. Seriously go study something you like. It’s not a good idea to study CS when you even struggle at the first assignment.

But here is the thing, for some students, CS is not apparently easy at first. My kid struggled at her summer program at MIT that’s why she wasn’t sure CS was for her, she was good in math, was planning to apply to Economics. But I suggested that she applied to engineering and change to Economics when she’s college and she agreed. Fast forward she is solidly a CS major and very good at debugging. She found a lot of weird bugs for the students that she tutored and also at her internship this summer.

So it’s a slow and steady process. But there were many times she called me and said she was behind on a programming project, I never helped with homework or programming project ever, not since she 2nd grade. So she was just venting.

16

This is a sign that it’s time to find something else. If it’s so bad that you dread the introductory courses, it won’t get any better. I will say in my case, for all the things there is to dislike about CS and programming, the introductory courses were actually quite pleasant. If you can’t get over that problem, then you really should not pursue CS.

But I feel like it’s probably mental block rather than genuine difficulty, in this case. Anyone who gets A’s in most classes should not find CS to be conceptually difficult. Debugging is a skill that has to be learned, to be sure - I only started to get the hang of it after maybe 3 years after the first time I started to code. What matters more is the willingness to learn how to do it and how to write code not to have bugs in it.

Also, as others have mentioned, software plays a very important role in helping others, albeit rather indirectly. In truth, the kinds of things that are usually associated with software (designing websites, making apps, the big “tech” companies etc) are really the least interesting part of software. Here’s a quote I somewhat like:

http://learnpythonthehardway.org/book/advice.html

[quote]
Programming as a profession is only moderately interesting. It can be a good job, but you could make about the same money and be happier running a fast food joint. You’re much better off using code as your secret weapon in another profession.

People who can code in the world of technology companies are a dime a dozen and get no respect. People who can code in biology, medicine, government, sociology, physics, history, and mathematics are respected and can do amazing things to advance those disciplines./quote

Being someone who knows both biology (or even better, medicine) and programming would be excellent both for a career and for making a difference for people.