Hey everyone so I am a sophomore in my fourth semester of college with a 3.74 GPA, and I am STUMPED! So I am currently a computer science major and I just landed this really nice tech job where the pay is good but most importantly the experience I am learning is beneficial to me as a person and on PAPER! BUT! I thought beforehand that helping people was going to apart of the job, and looking at the developers and programmers that work at my company who I once aspired to be like, do not really have any face to face interaction to help people. SO! Now, this is where I am really stressed out, I have always been an athlete and loved the human body and how it functions as I was always fascinated with my injuries, but with my only C in my transcript coming form Anatomy and Physiology part 1 and I have not even taken BIO 101 yet, is the medical field too far out of reach? meaning is it too late to change majors? and will my graduation be postponed?
I know this is a lot but as we all know from all of us who went or are attending college, choosing what you want to do for the rest of your life is the hardest decision you will encounter, so any help will honestly torpedo down huge walls that are standing in my way to a happy life, thank you all!!
What I get from the above is that you want face to face interaction with people. There are Information Technology (computer support and sales) jobs where you can get that.
(Even in a job where you aren’t working face to face with anyone, you are helping people.)
Well, you’ve only got experience with one kind of CS job so far. There are some CS jobs that involve more face-to-face helping people - you could develop software for a biotech company, or a nonprofit, or work as a programmer on a team of non-programmers developing software to help them achieve their goals. We have some programmers and IT people on my team of psychologists who do that.
Another suggestion is to think about human-computer interaction and/or user experience research/design. This is my field, so I’m biased but UX and HCI are both combinations of computer science and psychology used to understand how people interact with software and technology. This kind of work is in a lot of tech sectors - from gaming to devices to operating systems to biotech and everything else. There’s lots of direct work with people through research, and through collaborating with developers and programmers to help refine products.
Another suggestion is bioinformatics. Medically related, but still relies heavily on that CS degree. You can add a biology minor or just take a few courses and learn more about it (it’s using CS and computational modeling to solve problems in the biological and medical sciences).
A lot of people think of “helping people” and jump straight to medical school, but there are a VAST number of jobs in which you can help people and/or work with people directly (which is really what it sounds like you want to do).
Also, please don’t think of it as “choosing what I want to do for the rest of my life.” That’s not really what you are doing. Lots of people change careers, and your major is not the only determining factor of what kind of work you do. Think of it more like, what do you enjoy doing now? And what would you like to continue to study for the next 2 years and maybe start your career in?
To answer your last question, I think if you haven’t already taken biology or chemistry or any of the pre-med prerequisites and you are already a sophomore, the pre-med curriculum would be difficult or impossible to finish in the remaining two years you have. You’d have to take two to three semesters of biology, two to three semesters of chemistry, and two semesters of physics. Some med schools require a semester or two of the social/behavioral sciences as well.