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As a junior at a university outside Boston who has dealt with the same questions, here's my advice: Personally (this may not be you), I would say drop the lab job unless you're really enjoying it or it's very clearly worth the time. You've got a lot going on for a freshman and you can always explore a lab job again later in your undergraduate career. I don't worry too much about GPA. You're at a well known school with a good reputation. I don't know what your definition of "do well in school" is, but notwithstanding the unfortunate fact that your school seems to have significantly less grade inflation than similar schools (which is bad when employers are looking at your school and GPA and don't know what the average GPA is, and assume it's higher than it is), I don't believe that having a GPA in, say, the 95th+ percentile is worth the potentially 4-5x more time spent studying than for a GPA in the 50-75th percentile, depending on what classes you take. If you can do something noteworthy as a result of the freed up time, it will be more valuable to employers than a higher GPA. (Looking at your resumé, you are more than on your way already). There's nothing wrong with neuroscience as a major, but I do advise taking a broad spectrum of classes to expand your horizons. I've learned a huge amount just by exploring the available information about interesting subjects that have only been introduced in my classes. I also extol the merit of taking lots of compsci classes, particularly because they will give you lots of practice programming, which will help you spend less time building your own projects in the long run. They will also expose you to important theoretical computer science ideas that, while not talked about every day in industry, can be indispensable. Taking an algorithms class will make you stop writing grossly inefficient code, for instance. I'm doing nothing for the next month before I go abroad (besides finding and building my next project) -- let me know if you want to grab lunch or something. You might want to attend http://developersdevelopersdevelopersdevelopers.org/. |