I am a second year in Statistics but looking at majoring in something programming related. Unfortunately, my math grade is not high enough for me to qualify for the MathComp major anyways. I have received As in my programming classes so the programming part is more important to me.
The Ling and CS major is a BA which I am afraid will not get me the most preferable jobs. I am looking to be a software engineer but also doing something in artificial intelligence is intriguing.
What careers can I pursue with a Ling and CS major? Can I apply for the same ones as MathComp? Math is not my strongest suit but I know the math up to multivariable calculus.
Any advice would be super helpful. Thanks in advance.
Hi there. That’s something that I dealt with as well. I always received mediocre grades in math courses, but typically did a lot better in programming courses. I liked the programming aspect of CS, but not so much the theory. Discrete math slaughtered me.
Ling/CS could be an interesting major. The whole BA vs. BS thing does not typically matter to most employers. Your grades and skills/experience are far more important. It’s true that you might not have all of the same opportunities as a pure CS major and if you want to go into artificial intelligence, a CS or math major might better prepare you for such a career. Have you taken any linguistics courses? UCLA is well-respected for its linguistics program. You could potentially go into jobs in speech recognition (Siri, Alexa, etc. type work) or something like a language engineer (basically helping programmers with language-based software). The CS skills you’ll get with the joint major will sure help in any programming position, but the linguistics aspect might narrow the type of programming job offers you’d get - at least at first. The major sounds rather cool to me. Linguists and computer scientists are always fighting each other 
so a major that incorporates both fields is interesting. I majored in computational linguistics at USC, just for a bit of background about me 
If you do go down this Ling/CS route, I strongly suggest taking foreign language courses (Arabic, Mandarin, or Spanish especially). There’s a great demand for computational linguists with mastery of these languages, so that will make you far more desirable in the job market
I am multilingual (Spanish, French, Chinese, English) so that’s why I am considering this major. But thank you so much for the response. Hopefully after talking to a career counselor and seeing what exact jobs I can get I will have a better idea of what’s right for me.
Yes, talking to a career counselor and even the advisor for the major would be an excellent idea Many people do assume that if you’re a linguistics major, you’re automatically a polygot. That isn’t always the case, however. We don’t really learn new languages as part of the field, rather, we examine the common structure shared among all languages. Your knowledge of multiple languages will definitely benefit you though if you choose to go with this major as you’ll have perspective that many of your peers won’t have.