Which major is best for me?
Personally I had deep interest in Physics as a kid but also I love technology and love programming.
If we consider salary only, which major is the best in the future?
Also what major is most “flexible” in such that has more opportunities? If I were to choose Physics or Chemical Engineering, I am afraid I’ll be stuck in a lab, or tied to a organization for the rest of my life. I wouldn’t have much success creating my own company/service.
Computer Science however offers more flexibility. Do you agree?
http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/internships-careers-employment/1121619-university-graduate-career-surveys.html
http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/info-Degrees_that_Pay_you_Back-sort.html
Be aware that there are industry business cycles, so the employment prospects associated with specific majors may differ four years from now compared to today. For example, CS majors who started college in 1998 graduated into the poor employment prospects of the tech bubble crash.
The tech bubble affected more on investors than on CS graduates. I don’t recall that CS majors had very poor job prospects during the dot com crash 1999-2003. I actually made most money during the period from 2000 to 2007. What I remember most was the pain that many engineers, physicists, aircraft designers,… who worked for the defense industries and lost their jobs when the military bugdet was cut from 1995 to 2001. The termination of the Strategic Defense Initiative (Star War), the closure of military bases, and the military downsizing caused a lot of job loss throughout the entire nation during that period. Some hardware engineers I knew were not able to find jobs for more than two, three years. Some of them had to go back to school for retraining or switched career. The software engineers were least affected. They were able to switch to commercial jobs quicker.
If you do study physics make sure you take some computer science classes and you will be ok.
The link on post #1 could be outdated. EE and CE earned more then CS must be in the past. Not anymore, you can’t find job easily with those two majors, mostly smaller companies if you do.
CS major now is like an octopus, it has many tentacles in many industries, something to keep in mind.
From what I saw, the job market for software was quite poor in 2001-2003, with massive layoffs and companies going out of business dumping unemployed former employees into the job market. Few, if any, companies were growing. Venture capitalists went from funding everything and losing to fearfully going ultra-conservative and funding hardly anything. The offshore outsourcing business fad also took hold around this time, resulting in more job losses (some companies outsourced more than they should have, but only realized it a few years later to bring the jobs back).
Enrollment in the CS major at Berkeley during that period dropped to the point that the enrollment cap was removed (so that it was no longer necessary to have a GPA higher than 2.0 to declare the CS major). More recently (as software job prospects remained decent despite the 2008-2009 financial and real estate crash that left many civil engineers and architects unemployed), CS enrollment has increased, resulting in the enrollment cap being reinstated (requiring a 3.0 GPA to declare the major, increasing to 3.3 GPA this year).
Every branch of engineering has its cycles, you might even say that any area of employment has cycles. However, the good engineers always seem to find jobs (during the NASA retooling period around 2004 when they were cutting programs left and right; my company laid off a few guys at the bottom of the rungs and put a lot of us on burden accounts just so we would be there when NASA came calling again, and they did). It is those same good engineers that seem to make the most money.
So, from what I have seen, it is not what field you are in but how good you are. There is also a strong correlation between being good and liking what you do.
My advice, choose a field that you like and you’ll do all right.
“Personally I had deep interest in Physics as a kid” - Tell us more about what level class and which topics you liked.
Yes, there were massive layoffs in the software development market. But people forget that the majority of software developers and managers during that time did not have a degree in CS. They just picked up some books like “VB Script for Dummies”, “Javascript for Dummies”, “Oracle Unleashed”, “MS Certification in SQL Server 1997”, “How to use Microsoft Project”,… then jumped on the dot com bandwagon. They got jobs through consulting and temp staffing agencies because the managers did not know how to hire. I can say with confidence that 70-80% of developers in the companies I worked for during that time did not major in CS. And a large part of them did not have a college degree. Most of their work was buggy and hard to fix. I saw one of the highly paid VB consultants did now know anything about programming. He used names like Sally, Tom, Dave,… as variables in the code. Many DBAs I worked with in a company handling stock trading data did not how to write a simple SQL query. They only knew how to back up data and run the SQL scripts that some other people and I wrote for them. One time they were not able to restore the data because they never checked to see the backup tape was good or not. When the bubble burst, these people picked up the pink slips first and could not find the next job. People with strong training in CS had some setback too but they were able to find the next job.
It was just an emotional reaction like the emotional investments in dot com high priced stocks.
90% of people in engineering got laid off in the dot com burst, not just software.
This is an interesting selection of majors you have chosen. You usually don’t see many people trying to decide between chemical engineering and computer science, which makes me question why you chose these majors. Just some food for thought:
Chemical engineering-- great option if you work in energy and live in the right place (do you live in Texas?–> $$$)
Computer Science-- this is the hot degree right now and there is a demand (great flexibility here)
Physics-- you will probably have to go to grad school-- is this a dilemma? if no, great.
Where do you see yourself in 10 years? I know this is a very difficult question to ask oneself, but it could reveal a tentative path to follow.
Have you looked at the curriculum for chemical engineering/computer science/physics? Does it sound interesting?
Where do you want to go to school?
Keep in mind that your degree doesn’t have as much bearing on your career as you would think. The chemical engineering major I knew went on to work as a consultant for Boston Consulting Group even though he got offers from Chevron/Exxon.
Those who did have degrees in CS did get laid off during that time, and found it very difficult to find jobs during that time and had to look for months or years before being employed again.
I think it happened to everybody. Also during the dot com bust, there was a bit of ageism and discrimination. One I’ve heard is that if you were out of work for a long time as in more than 6 months, companies wanted to find out what were you’ve been doing, how you were able to keep up with technology. Just looking for jobs was not good enough. I have one friend who has been unemployed since, perhaps for that reason. He took classes for a few years to wait out.
While in the past, I have been unemployed but found job after a year off. Nobody questioned why I was off for more than 6 months. My skill was intact because I’ve got compliment from the PhD guy that hired me. But after the dot com bust, people invented things to not hire you.
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Yea I chose Chemical Engineering because I like chemistry in general but I also love CS as well. Overall I have quite interest in STEM majors which is why I could go for any of them really.
In the future, I would love to see myself having a passive income. I would like to be founder of a company of some sort. That’s my dream really.
That’s not the kind of thing that you can get from school. Your education really just gives you a place to start, and then you build on it however you choose.
CS is by far the most flexible, if you insist on working on in-the-specialty projects. ChemE work is generally done in a few geographically concentrated areas (if you aren’t willing to move to where the jobs are, that’s pretty much a deal breaker), but it pays well if you like to work in a lab for oil & gas. Physics is primarily academic, but your quantitative skills are useful everywhere, so you could probably find a job in programming.
I have a degree in Chemical Engineering, and to be perfectly honest if I had a choice I probably wouldn’t have chosen that route twice. As it worked out, I graduated with a second degree in math, which paired with the engineering turned out to be rather lucrative and sufficient for most programming or programming + engineering work. ME/EE/CS would have probably been a better choice though, truth be told. If you’re in it for your love of chemistry, you will be sorely disappointed by the kind of things you learn in upper division courses.
For a computer science (programming) career I would also consider a computer engineering major (making sure I did a lot of coursework in programming), because, with hardware, circuits and physics covered, it will give both knowledge of the physical sciences and (with its greater breadth and rigor) a more thorough understanding of computers than a computer science major does.
The 2012 median pay for “physicists and astronomers” according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (http://www.bls.gov/ooh/Life-Physical-and-Social-Science/Physicists-and-astronomers.htm) was $106,000, which is (modestly) higher than that for the other occupations you mention.
As far as “ten year average” earnings for these MAJORS is concerned, physics also leads according to the (comparatively small) database at the Students Review dot com site, although chemical engineering leads in starting salary. It looks like some of their data may go back to 2000.
Well, to be a “physicist or astronomer” you would have to finish the PhD, possibly a few postdocs, and then to get one of those annoyingly difficult academic/government/industry research positions in the field. So you’re looking at people in their 30’s, which means that you are comparing that median to engineers that are about a decade younger. Compare that number to “median pay for engineers with at least 10 years of experience” and you will find a much less flattering comparison.
Academic careers like physics are not worth it financially because anyone talented enough to become what is called a physicist could easily excel at the relatively easy stuff you get paid for as an engineer in industry (the prerequisites for that work far, far exceed the actual brain work it takes to do those jobs). You do it for non-financial reasons, such as the desire to do physics for a living. It’s a pretty bum deal to go that route, whether or not it sounds more interesting, if it doesn’t offer you a solid living. A somewhat reduced salary is a given, but it shouldn’t be a vow of poverty like it has a tendency to be nowadays.