Overview

Overview

We're not scary computer hacker nerds, we promise.

Description

Ah, computers. The glorious machines that make our world go 'round. They're the machines that allow us to get on Facebook and YouTube (hooray for cat videos). Beneath the crisp-looking screen—or not, if you're still running Windows 98 or something—and the not-so-clean keyboard, there's a bunch of circuits doing a billion calculations per second, turning the letters we type on our keyboard into 0s and 1s that tells the computer what to show on our screens. Computer scientists are not scary, mysterious people who magically make computers work; they're simply the ones who methodically create instructions so computers know what to do.

Majoring in computer science in college will not be easy. You'll be doing tons of advanced math, learning and working in new languages that you've probably never seen before (and are arguably less intuitive than Spanish or French), and you'll probably be having more than just a couple homework-induced all-nighters.

If you follow through with computer science in college and can show competency in coding, it'll pay for itself handsomely once you hit the job market. Currently, jobs related to computer science have the most openings and are the most stable. In addition, the average salary of a computer scientists is much better than that of many other fields, not to mention you get to live in nice places such as New York, the Silicon Valley, Seattle, Chicago, and Washington, D.C. If you follow through with a computer science-related job, you'll be really well off as you reach the later stages of your career.

Famous People who majored in Computer Science

  • Jimmy Fallon (with Communications)
  • Sergey Brin (with Mathematics)
  • Marrisa Mayer
  • Ada Lovelace
  • Alan Turing

Percentage of US students who major in Computer Science:

1.39%

Stats obtained from this source.