I have visited some schools which offer a concentration or major in computational neuroscience. While I have a general understanding of what the field is, I do have some specific questions:
Yes, if you like it!
There are lots of careers that you can go into. Most careers aren’t really limited by what your college major was, and less than half of people who majored in a STEM field actually work in it after college. So your career options are really only limited by your imagination (and ones that require specific professional preparation, like nursing or accounting).
Most colleges don’t offer majors in computational neuroscience. Generally, that’s a concentration you get on the graduate level. Some excellent places I’ve seen that actually have that major at the undergraduate level are USC and Carnegie Mellon (they have a computational concentration in their neuroscience major). Johns Hopkins offers computational neuroscience as a focus/concentration area in their neuroscience major as well, and is a great place to study neuroscience. DePaul University has computational neuroscience concentration as well.
University of Chicago has a neuroscience major and a computational neuroscience minor. Vanderbilt has a major in neuroscience and a minor in scientific computing. The University of Washington has an undergraduate minor and training program in neural computation and engineering. Northwestern offers coursework in computational neuroscience in their neuroscience and biological sciences majors.
Since computational neuroscience is the employment of mathematical/computer science tools to understand brain function, another option is to attend a school with good solid math, computer science, and neuroscience departments/programs. Then you can major in neuroscience and take courses in and/or minor in one of the other fields, or you can create an independent/individualized major in the area.
Also, if you are interested in this major, you might also be interested in cognitive science. Cognitive science is an interdisciplinary field concerned with cognition, or thought; it draws on psychology, neuroscience, computer science, linguistics, philosophy, and other fields. This would be another place where you might find some concentration in computational neuroscience - for example, UCSD, which has an excellent (and one of the oldest) cognitive science undergraduate majors, has a concentration in machine learning and neural computation.
@juillet Thank you so much for that thorough response, this helped me a lot! This sounds like the concentration for me and I’ll check out the colleges you listed. Thanks again!