Many of you have probably heard of the college major known as computer science. However, you might be wondering, what all is involved in computer science? How do you become a computer scientist? What college’s may be best for this career? As I am interested in computer science myself, I have a bit more knowledge about this particular major and will answer all these questions and more in this article.

On a basic level, computer science is the study of the algorithms and codes that allows a computer operate properly. Computer science can be subdivided into two sections: one which is called Theoretical Computer Science and the other being called Applied Computer Science. Theoretical studies consist mainly of programming while Applied studies are made up things like computer graphics and artificial intelligence.

Becoming a computer scientist doesn’t involve having any special education and it doesn’t even require you to necessarily have high grades. However, many of the more prestigious colleges list computer science as part of their engineering school and sometimes, these engineering schools require higher GPA’s than the normal college does. Keep this in mind if you’re searching for a school with a good computer science program. While there is no best college for computer science, some of the top colleges for computer science include: Stanford, UCLA, Texas, Michigan, and Purdue. Of course these aren’t the only colleges for computer science, however, all of these schools have programs ranked within the top 25.

There are many jobs available for people with a computer science major, the most common of these being a Software Applications Developer. In simplest terms, you’re creating a new computer program using your extensive knowledge of coding. This also involves maintaining the program’s efficiency and knowing how to fix the program if it stops functioning properly. Not to mention, that the average salary for someone in this line of work is 90,000 per year. On top of this, as computer’s keep becoming more advanced, we will need people who understand the technology to help create programs for these new computers. An example of a famous computer scientist would be Bill Gates, the man who created Microsoft. He is currently the richest man in the world who is worth around 78 billion dollars, but I doubt any of us will ever become that wealthy! If computer science sounds like something you might be interested in, make sure to look into it more and hopefully, you’ll be able to become someone who helps to create the technology of tomorrow!