double major?

My advice to you as a fellow student, for whatever it's worth:

Major in CS.

Be good at math.

Don't forget the humanities classes. Seriously.

Have fun in school.

Don't waste your time with an IT major. It sounds generic and not nearly as technical as a CS major.

Computer engineering is not computer programming. I don't see its usefulness as a game programmer.

Make friends. Not just for job connections.

Don't forget to turn off the computer every now and then.

Course programming assignments/requirements are the lowest hurdle to step over. Challenge yourself to go far beyond. Learning linked lists? Try doubly linked lists, circular linked lists, skip lists, etc.

Learn how to teach yourself. Figure out what works best for you and what doesn't.

Play games. Think about them. Figure out how they work. How does the design work? How do you think the programmers did it? What data structures / algorithms do you think are being used?

Look at the code written by other people. Compare it to yours.

Study some software engineering. Maybe some project management. Programming isn't the exclusive activity to making games.

And lastly... write games on your own. Start SIMPLE. Start with text based tic-tac-toe or something, move up to pong, then maybe break-out, asteroids, tetris, pac-man, etc. Each game project will take 10x longer then the last. You'll find that when you get to 95% complete, the last 5% is the hardest and will make or break your game success.

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Original post by slayemin But trust me on the sunscreen...

I agree, especially on the humanities and other "turn off the computer" type advice. Go in with an open mind. Most people I talk to see everything outside their major as a waste of time. I never saw it as a waste of time since I have interests beyond my particular field (math and physics in undergrad, materials science in grad) and thought it a good way to indulge those, but, even if not for that, the way they approach problems is different and learning that helped me look at problems in my field differently which helps in problem solving. It also helped some in talking about what I do to people not directly involved in my research, let alone people from completely different fields (not that I'm very good at either of those things).

I think that a double major in CS and math would be the best bet of the fields listed since there's likely a decent overlap in the requirements, they complement each other well, they're relatively generic (opening more doors), and they're well respected fields (math > CS > IT when it comes to sounding like a real degree to people). There was a lot of overlap between math and physics, which helped a lot in getting the double major finished. In fact, at the end of my junior year, I looked to see if I could pick up any minors relatively easily, and saw that I could get a stat minor with only two more courses, one of which was a freshman course. Playing my cards right, I was able to finish in four years with two majors and a minor spending most semesters with barely enough credits to be full time.

A lot of CS degrees have a minor in math. Making math a major isn't very hard. It's just a few more classes. Often people going for their masters in CS will 'automatically' double major in math, but that's just from what I've seen. Not sure what an IT major entails though. If you wanted to be a programmer and learn programming related things you should have gone with a CS degree. (Though many will say that CS isn't about programming... meh).

ok well the thing is, I already changed my major from undecided to IT and it was a big pain in the ass to get that changed and dealing with the scheduling and whatnot. Also, at NJIT the IT program offers game programming, that's why I chose that. But then, ppl said that CS is good for programming. I looked through the catalog and many of the courses I looked through that I wanted to take from CS was part of the CS major, so I was thinking why not just do double major? What I was wondering was how different is CS and IT and are they similar or completely different and would it make a difference to double major in them. Also, in our school, you can take a CS dual with Math, so if I did that with IT would that be a triple major? =0 About the computer engineering, I just wanted to that as a minor just to do something else and because I love computers. I was also considering doing music as that's what I did alot in high school.

Being completely honest, IT at my school is basically a watered down CS program. IT majors take easier (and fewer) programming courses; instead of discrete mathematics, they take an easier class called "finite math." They don't have to complete the full calculus sequence. And after that they primarily take courses like networking (not programming networks, but setting them up using all the tools that ship with Windows or other operating systems).

If you want to work as a programmer, IT, at least at my school, isn't going to get you there very easily. I think you'd constantly be fighting against your IT degree if you were trying to get serious programming positions. Of course, after you've been working as a programmer for a few years, your college degree becomes less important and work experience begins to take precedence, but getting those initial years of experience as a programmer could be tough with an IT degree.

Given that an IT degree is just a watered down CS degree at my university, I really don't see the point in doing both.

Personally I'm going for a CS/math dual major, and I'm leaving room open for a possible minor if I happen to stumble across a subject that interests me enough. CS and math go along very well. Having a math degree alone isn't going to get you a lot of jobs, but in addition to a CS degree it will open up a lot of opportunities (any programming position that involves math will be easier for you to get, such as software analyst positions at financial firms or graphics programming positions at game companies).

Computer engineering is usually a different beast from computer programming. That said, it'd still be a beneficial degree to have, and I know there are a lot of companies that treat the degrees almost interchangeably with certain positions (one intern at IBM told me that the interviewers didn't distinguish between computer engineering and computer science degrees).

The bottom line is that if you're serious about programming, computer science is in all cases the wisest and safest route. Straying from a traditional CS degree when you want to work as a programmer almost always introduces extra risk, unnecessary complications, and lack of flexibility in the types of jobs you could reasonably expect to get hired for.