| CS is a safe bet. If you study CS at a good school and graduate well, do a bit of portfolio, and study for interview tests, you'll land a job at a large company that pays much better than what most of your peers can expect. We tend to focus on the richest and most successful, and forget that most people really don't do that well. They don't have much power at work, and don't get paid a lot. CS is a safe bet to avoid that. You might not like programming, and if that's the case I'd avoid it. You spend a lot of your life at work, so you'd better enjoy what you do. Where you start your career isn't where you end up. When you get your first job it will be in a particular industry - health, auto, finance. You'll find that you can easily either move to the same role in a different industry, or a different role in the same industry. Your first job is where you start, not where you end up. And things go down as well as up if you take the wrong step. Developers don't end up on the board of companies. Managers end up on the boards of companies, and finance people. But a developer job can pay for an MBA, and a developer can move into management, of various types, all from the security of a fairly comfy starting place. A lot of Math majors find themselves a bad fit for any particular job. Same with physics. If they want to get a job after graduation, maybe they can become developers, but it isn't as sure a bet. If they go onto a PHD, maybe they can become quants, or data scientists these days. Business majors either get onto a grad scheme or they might as well not have studied. That grad scheme will either carry them to the point they need to start a stellar career, or will be grunt work that pays less than a dev job and is significantly more boring. The scary thing about tech work is how fast technology moves. You have to put time and energy into keeping up, outside of work. And for a lot of people, with families, that's very hard to do. It's really tough. I notice this way of life starting to hit other sectors too. You are at highschool and don't really know yourself yet though. So my takeaway would be that, if you choose the wrong major, you can always find your way to something else. It's just a lot easier if you're already in a decently paid job that you just don't like much. |