Intended Audience: People who are about to join college and want to know more about a bachelor's program in CS.
All the information I provide about colleges is with respect to Indian colleges. I have no knowledge about colleges in other countries.
Most students when they graduate high school, are confused about what major to pursue. Usually, they choose a major based on their experience with that subject in their school years or based on the opinions of their parents or friends. Through this article, I wish to make you a bit aware of the field of computer science and most importantly what does a bachelor's degree in computer science offers you and what will your 4 years in college be like.
If you are interested in knowing how a computer works, how to program a computer, build apps, websites, AI agents, games, etc. you'll love this field. By understanding technology, you can implement your most innovative and creative ideas. It could be an app that solves a problem you or a community faces or it could be an awesome game or an AI agent that could play a game like chess or an AI like Jarvis that can understand your speech and talk back to you!
Creating anything is an art. With programming, you will create applications. How can you make your application scale (handle huge server load or data)? How intuitive is the user interface? How easily can other engineers and yourself understand your code? How easily can your code be extended if your application needs to support an additional feature? Managing all this is truly an art. You'll appreciate it when you build something on your own.
The greatest advantage of this field is that you can do anything with a computer and the internet. This is unlike other fields where you might need special equipment and labs to work. If you need something more powerful than your personal computer to run a program you could get some high-end computers in the cloud. These days most companies run the applications on cloud servers that they don't own and you could easily do the same.
A bachelor's degree in CS introduces you to a huge variety of topics. You'd be exposed from low-level IC chip design to distributed systems in the cloud. If this sounds cool, it is. However, the bad news is that in my opinion, 4 years isn't enough to learn all this stuff properly. The curriculum is such that most of the concepts will be taught either only in a theoretical manner or only in an application-oriented manner. I think that both theory and application are necessary and without both, you'll have a half-knowledge which you will forget soon. Hence you'll find that most of the students would study these huge amounts of topics just enough to get a good grade in the exams and spend most of their time getting deep into those few topics they're interested in.
Depending upon where you are doing your bachelor's, the professors you'll have will have a variety of professors who'll either inspire you or simply make your life hard. When you are introduced to a new subject, your interest in that subject depends on how well the professor presents that subject. Some professors won't even care about teaching. Some won't know the subject well, they would never question things and go deep. Some will be so amazing that they'll be the reason that you go to college every day. This is just to let you know that when you go to college suddenly you won't have amazing teachers teaching you, most of the time you just have to learn everything by yourself. The value in going to college is more about the exposure and opportunities it opens than the academic education that happens.
If you graduate from a top recognized college, you'll be assumed to be smart and many will favor you, be it universities (when applying for higher education) or companies (when applying for jobs). You'll also have great peers, great professors, and overall better opportunities.
Does that mean you are doomed if you graduate from a not-so-popular college? No, but you have to get yourself recognized and you have to prove to others that you are smart. This college-based discrimination is something that unfortunately exists in the current society which is slowly but surely being changed by those people from not-so-popular colleges who break those images for themselves and everyone else too.
However academically speaking there is little difference between colleges. They all teach the same stuff. If your professor doesn't teach well, you could learn the same from the internet.
These days people are getting into the software industry without a college degree. Bootcamps are becoming popular. And some people are self-taught, i.e. they teach themselves everything that is needed from the internet or books without relying on a college or a bootcamp.
Education these days is getting more and more expensive. However, if you are doing your bachelor's in a field like CS, numerous well-paying job opportunities are waiting for you (not that they hand you the job just for finishing your bachelor's, but if you put in the work you can get into some good jobs). In this regard, I view taking education loans as a good thing as they can be repaid once you get a job. However, before choosing a college try to gather information on the college's placement track record, what companies come for recruitment there, etc. You can gather this information by talking to that college's students whom you can easily find on LinkedIn. The placement record is important because it's easier to get a job in on-campus placements than in off-campus placements. If lots of good companies with good packages come to recruit from a college then you wouldn't have much difficulty in getting at least a 6LPA job offer. Not that it is extremely difficult to get a job off-campus but the placement record is a metric you need to be aware of when comparing colleges. When evaluating this, place more importance on the number of companies that come for recruitment and the quality of those companies. Again remember, it's okay to study in any college but when you are choosing your college it's beneficial to maximize your chances to get opportunities.
After your bachelors you could do any of these:
One very important thing that you need to be aware of is that you will need to spend time preparing for your future while you are doing your bachelor's. Depending upon what exactly you want to do, you might need to do some additional things apart from your college academics. For example, if you want to pursue a master's, you will need to prepare for GRE or GATE or such exams. If you want to get a software engineering job, you'd need to prepare for software engineering interviews which depending upon the company require you to be proficient in Data Structures & Algorithms and would also expect you to have done some projects. All these would require some significant time dedicated for it. You would have to discuss these details with your mentors, make a plan and work on it. However, if you haven't even started your bachelor's yet you do not need to worry about it, I just wanted to let you know some of the common paths that most people take after a bachelor's and what that means to what you do during your bachelor's.
You are now aware a little bit about the field of computer science. You are also aware of that
If you wish to know more about a career in programming, I'd recommend you to check out this book Your First Year in Code | A complete guide for new & aspiring developers.
The goal of this book is to help you start your programming journey a year or two ahead of where we were when we started. There's a lot of how-to, a splash of career advice, and a bit of pep talk. It's a good read for Computer Science majors, dev bootcamp students, beginning devs on a self-learning path, or anyone who wants to figure out if programming is for them.
Comments