my actual unironic advice to undergrads is to major in something you're actually passionate about/interested in, and then try and *minor* in either CS or stats. you would be surprised how how much being the person who knows a substantive thing and can do some basic computer/stats stuff can pay off
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you can still focus on your areas of interest and have a coveted skill that many of your cohorts will lack
Throw in a service industry job to learn smalltalk and you're set.
That and more civics might have saved us from our present predicament.
I love geometry, it is a thing of beauty, but I’d bump it from HS in favor of stats.
i don't even do the main thing i studied, but being "vaguely technical guy with a lot of soft skills" is very useful
It makes it much easier to minor in CS/data science.
I tell my students not to fear math/stats. Learning to work with data is one of the most useful skills you can get, regardless of your field.
-- read large texts carefully
-- speak and write clearly and for a particular audience
-- plan and execute any project (programming, researching and writing, anything) that takes many weeks and 50+ hours of work
-- be numerate and math literate, unintimidated by # s
I got undergrad and grad degrees in math and computer science. Almost ALL the value to my life was from the first 4-6 undergrad math/CS courses. The rest was just because I was interested in it.
1. 1 credit Intro to Unix
2. Intro to Data Science, where I learned about relational databases/joins/filtering.
3. Islamic Communities in Scandinavia
- advisor in computer science was an English teacher before she got her PhD, and she taught me how to write and edit properly
- course in discrete mathematics taught me to do rigorous thinking and proof
- editing the school newspaper taught me to write quickly
I constantly get praise at work for clear and concise writing and I have never once felt the urge to reach for generative AI to "help."
I don't work as a psychologist or a writer, but I use what I learned in those classes every day
It ain't nursing. You actually have to find niches and synergies, but the opportunity is there, and the high end is actually quite good.