so I'm in my first year of college right now and I'm completely flummoxed about major options.

I love history, politics and helping others as a kind of counselor. These are things I have always enjoyed and in a perfect world I'd love to be a political commentator for a radio station or a campaign runner.

sadly this isn't a perfect world, and these passions have virtually no opportunity for a competent job.

so my father (a small business owner) really stresses that I should get a business degree so I have some job security. Everyone else I know also says I should really get a business degree.

my mother really stresses I should get a computer science degreee or some kind of computer education because it's in very high demand, and she thinks always will be.

I don't want to go out of college with nothing to show for myself to employers so I've leveled it down to these two majors to ensure a job.

I don't know which one to do. business sounds like the most sure-fire, but I also enjoy computers and I'm told it'll always be a good job-getter.

for those computer science: how is it? if you've already got one, how plentiful is work for you? What exactly do you do? I see myself being a more hands-on networking and trouble-shooting kind of IT person rather than a programmer. Is this practical?

for those going into business: how is it? how plentiful is work? Would you recommend it?

thanks

I find it insanely boring and am thinking of switching to an English major out of fear that I can't stand the classes any longer. The students are by far the most awkward and least fun in any of my courses, it's taught very similar to a math course, and I'm getting Cs because of my style - which worked for projects outside class, modelled after what I observed in open source programs.

IT support is pretty tedious, unless you like spending all your time keeping people's printers working. Some of the people in question can be very rude and will hold you responsible for every design flaw, of which there are many, and various of their own failings too.

I actually enjoy most aspects of my job, whether development or systems administration, but what has been a major problem is that the IT field tends to attract very poor managers who have little understanding of the nature of the job (sometimes these people are wilfully ignorant) which causes an awful lot of friction. This tends to result in quite a high degree of stress-related illness amongst people who work in IT; that is admittedly in part because they're largely a self-selected group who may be more prone to that sort of thing than average, but poor management is very widely reported. Although a good project manager is worth their weight in gold, they're few and far between.

I suppose in short, if I could turn the clock back 25 years, I'd choose another career.

If you go for a computer science degree be careful where you get it from. I got my certification learning cobol, how to design flowcharts and how to operate windows, all of which is either common knowledge stuff or useless and outdated. Almost everything I know about programming and computer science is self taught.

IT manager is actually a career path the OP can take that meets both of his potential career paths. It'd be nice to have a few good ones of those, because as you mentioned they are few and far in between.

Just gotta look at prospective school's offerings for Information Systems degrees or Information Technology degrees.

The secret to being happy.....


Do what you love

The nice things about history and politics, is that you can pursue it as a passion outside of your job. It does, however, piss me off as a business major when people think that's its really easy and just what people use to get a job. IS it easier than a hard science degree? Probably, but I don't think you can judge majors by that, if you have talent for science, you probably won't succeed in business. Be prepared for a lot of group work and a raised grading curve if you take business.

That being said, take a year general but take the requirements for business/comp sci as well, or just wait a year before you go to college.

I'm already in college actually, and I do believe business is a very serious major. I've gotten a lot of de-facto training from my father who has done a great job of disproving the whole "you're a businessman, what do you have to complain about?"

I do want a job though, and business is a good way to get work. I do also want to run a business of my own at some point in my life.
group work sounds good, I'm used to group work.

For IT, it really depends on the work. "IT" is such a generic marketing term & can mean so many things job-wise.
My husband worked in a small IT service company - they worked for large business companies setting up & maintaining their internal infrastructure & security systems...eg not Best Buy's Geek Squad type stuff - as an employee (partly field, partly managerial) for many years and he worked 60-80 hour weeks (salaried, not per hour) including weekends a lot of the time. Very stressful. I hardly ever saw him, lol. He finally couldn't take it anymore.
But then he become a (regular) contractor for a couple clients and makes more per hour, with much greater freedom/less hours. However, he's still always "on call", has to constantly learn/keep up with tech as it moves/changes (you never stop having to "school" yourself), works/studies quite a few hours that are unbilled and it's pretty hard to take a long vacation of very many days in a row.

For IT as a "secure" career, I'd imagine it depends at least partially on where you live and where you're willing to live. We live within "Silicon Valley" in California. There's almost always work. Companies always need their stuff serviced, or networks/security setup & maintained, and tend to pay a lot for it. However, the better paying, more "serious" jobs can still slow down greatly with the economy.

Can't speak to business or college, but in my head it seems to me that if you could Major in Business with a minor in Computer Science, that might be what I'd choose in this day & age.

I wouldn't call IT a marketing term, it's just a field and as such covers a broad range of jobs -- just like engineering covers things from biomed, aerospace, and computers (to name just a few).

And yeah, sysadmin and infrastructure security are two extremely high-stress high-burnout careers and you have to stay on top of things.

As to IT being secure, I'd also say that depends on your definition. Lots of one-man teams out there (leading to the stress and burnout), lots of consulting as well, and lots of out-of-house IT work. Not exactly the atmosphere for high job security in my experience.

The outsourcing obsession has made it a very low-security job for the most part, even for people who are supposed to be "hands-on". Although the fad has generally been an abject failure, the message isn't getting through to the people who make the decisions so the situation's not improving in a hurry.

As part of my apprenticeship I got a job working for one of the biggest European IT companies. There is plenty of work to do, I get a list of features to develop, rarely do I finish them all before getting more, but if I do I can always ask for more and I will recieve. I'm a software developer so I implement features for one of the companies sites, run bug fixes on it, create unit tests etc. As for how my work is, it takes me 1.5 hrs to get here and since I'm still young in the world of development I can find it tough and too big of a challenge at times then I need to wait 2 hours before I get home; Stressing almost

A business degree covers an awfully large range of fields. What would you want to get into specifically?

Crimson's got it. You have to distinguish yourself from all the other business graduates somehow. I don't know exactly what American business degrees entail, though, or what people typically choose... If there are a lot of business majors with IT minors, you may want to think about doing/learning something superarogatory to get an edge.

drugs, its recession proof

an education in computer science means little compared to relevant job experience in the employment world, so be sure you can get at the very least an internship that lasts a few months before attempting that route

I've known people with IT degrees who are unable to get jobs, and people that were unable to ever get a degree but have multiple job offers. In IT it depends on where you're at (location) and what actual experience and skill you have as opposed to where you go to school or what degree you get.

Don't forget, Who you know.

I say without doubt or indecision that you should do precisely what you want to do/have an interest in. Sure, there are different tactics. For example, do something that will guarantee you a job more so, and is something that you "could do." Nevertheless, there is a chance you only live once.

On a different note, I agree with your mom. That is, I also think computer science will be a very valuable skill to have, and will increase to be in coming years. I say this with little uncertainty, however I am not really one to say such.

With that said, I think a college degree in some aspect of computer science (or general) would be great, and I currently feel it would be better to do that than to get something in that science through a university (I just realized I was speaking in terms of the Canadian education system...). Really, any field would be good. Internet design, programming... At least, I think.

IT support is a social job, no joke. I used to think it's a job sitting at the back of the server room, but it's not. You also get to meet many kinds of awesome and crappy women which you won't have chance to back in college (cause there are very few female students).

What's strange is that the number of women actually in IT has really dropped over the years. I worked in a large-ish IT department when I started off in 1989 and around 50% of the staff were women, but I watched the number gradually dwindle over the years especially as I changed employer and we're fairly few and far between nowadays. It seems the disinterest probably starts at school, I was amazed when my younger sister described why her computer studies class was so boring (she went to a girls-only school, for the record), rather than actually studying computing they simply taught them how to use Microsoft Office and went no further than that. I guess it's not really surprising that the numbers are falling since it's no longer an engaging subject at all.

No man, I didn't mean it directed towards you, I've just noticed a lot of people switching into it lately thinking its an easy major. You sound like you would enjoy it then, its probably about on par with other humanities. Good luck with whatever you decide to do!

Do a business course if you want to spend most of your contact hours having some muddle-headed deadbeat recite a weird mixture of buzzwords, platitudes, and vague meaningless [censored].

If you want to get smart so that you can think for yourself and make an effective contribution towards a business, do something like maths, physics, philosophy, economics. You know, something with a bit of rigour.