[emsal]

I'm a current CS student who's had a couple of backend internships and am interested in doing stuff with scientific computing in the future (likely wanting to go into grad school for this).

In general, where can I find resources about the kinds of career starting points I can get into as someone with this kind of interest? It seems like the most popular kind of job with a bit more theoretical rigour than web dev is being a data scientist/machine learning engineer at a similar webdev sort of company.

[jdiez17]

Here's a list of broad fields within scientific computing that you can dig into:

* Numerical simulation: writing code to solve physical models (fluid dynamics, material stress, etc), optimizing them for a given goal

* High-performance computing: running those simulations or other compute-intensive task in a supercomputer (aka a bunch of computers networked together), using APIs like OpenMP

* Machine learning: training and using mathematical models to predict things about the world. Seems to be all the rage right now...

* Data visualization: how do we make sense of all of this data!?

To answer your question more directly, if you have a broad familiarity with some of the topics I listed above (and a natural curiosity and ability to learn, most importantly), you should be able to land a junior job and go from there. Think about the types of companies that use these things. E.g.: biomedical companies need lots of machine learning people, jet engine manufacturers use lots of numerical simulations.

[emsal]

Thanks so much! This cleared up a lot of things for me.

[itronitron]

read up on the faculty in your current school and if anything have done anything of interest to you then ask to discuss their field of research. college is the perfect time to explore the landscape and find out about the various sub-disciplines in a field like CS