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[My Name is Immaterial]

I am a first year, first quarter Economics major, because I liked the economics classes I took in High School. I have no idea what I'm going to do with that, but the field of Econometrics sounds really fun.

[scrdest]

Biotechnology. Enslaving cells to do your bidding, genetic modification, that kinda stuff. Also making booze and bread.

[Arx]

Now look what you've done, scrdest. Now there are four things I want to major in! And the other three all had the same first year, too.

[hops]

Computer scientists are very employable, I know that much.

Yeah, that's one of the factors in my decision. My main trouble right now seem to stem from me not being sure if I like it. As in, more than anything else. I kind of picked up my mom's behavior of being a generalist in all things academic which would've been hip before the Industrial Revolution.

Pretty much that.
I'm studying mathematics, and while I have no idea what kind of job I'll get later on, I know the above holds true for mathematicians as well.

What kind of maths, exactly? Pure math?
I find that subject very interesting, and if I can actually get a job in artificial intelligence design I might actually get an opportunity to use calculus. Or maybe I'm overestimating programming.

I'm a full-time wage-slave. I work a desk job for a utility company. Actually pays quite well and the works not terrible, although mentioning my job to people is like involving billing etc. complaints. I don't work in billing, don't blame me!
Point is, there are jobs out there that pay decently that you can get with only half a uni degree, although it's far from my dream job, it's better than Walmart!

What do you actually do, though? I still don't understand how desk jobs in companies work, and my dad has always been kind of obtuse in answering that question. Do you just do a lot of paperwork and go to conferences and get jobs from people who actually do the more fun jobs relegated down to you?

I am a first year, first quarter Economics major, because I liked the economics classes I took in High School. I have no idea what I'm going to do with that, but the field of Econometrics sounds really fun.

Well, it's a pretty useful personal skill at any rate.

Biotechnology. Enslaving cells to do your bidding, genetic modification, that kinda stuff. Also making booze and bread.

What part of biotechnology are you looking to go at exactly?

Now look what you've done, scrdest. Now there are four things I want to major in! And the other three all had the same first year, too.

I wish there are ways to directly inject the memory of studying a course into your hippocampus.

[Helgoland]

Pretty much that.
I'm studying mathematics, and while I have no idea what kind of job I'll get later on, I know the above holds true for mathematicians as well.

What kind of maths, exactly? Pure math?

Of course! If I wanted to apply mathematics I'd have studied physics
Right now I'm on my way to becoming a topologist - or a geometer, but the two fields are closely related.

I guess the question you should ask yourself is: What gives you satisfaction? (No, professional masturbator is not something you can study, go is somewhat of an autodidact...) Do you like to see real-life problems solved in clever and ingenuous ways? Do you like finally understanding an abstract concept or a real-life phenomenon that seemed cryptic before? Do you like encountering and applying new, completely foreign concepts while getting a feeling for how they work? (That last one's me, pretty much. Algebra/topology FTW!)
If you prefer the first, go into a more applied field - engineering, or the more applied parts of programming. The non-physics natural sciences probably work as well - organic chemistry in particular is very much like playing with legos, just that the legos go into a person's body and kill all the ebola, for example.
A preference for the middle one means you should up the level of abstraction - go into a more theoretical branch of programming, or become a physicist. Discrete mathematics - the most programming-oriented part of mathematics - would probably fit in here as well, if on the far end of the abstraction scale.
If you want to do crazy messed-up stuff and thus chose the third option, become a theoretical physicist or go into the most theoretical branches of programming. Both of these however are very close to the hegemon of this third sector: Mathematics, the mother of all sciences. Mathematics at university is nothing like mathematics at school: It's all about logical structure and deducing interesting results from interesting assumptions. That's actually the reason mathematics is not a natural science: While the natural sciences work empirically, mathematicians can assume whatever they like - as long as they then stick to cold hard reasoning.
If anyone's interested I can translate a couple of entry-level exercises and post them here - but there's plenty of native English-speaking mathematicians on this board as well.

[Sheb]

I'm just going to disagree with one thing: organic chemistry doesn't cure Ebola, antibodies do.


Seriously, Organic Chemisty is really close to engineering in what you end up doing: designing ways to produce such-and-such molecule of interest.

Biotechnology does too, except you get you get to pester your Green friends by gifting them petri dish full of GMOs.

[scrdest]

Now look what you've done, scrdest. Now there are four things I want to major in! And the other three all had the same first year, too.

Jooooooin usssss...

I'm just going to disagree with one thing: organic chemistry doesn't cure Ebola, antibodies do.


Seriously, Organic Chemisty is really close to engineering in what you end up doing: designing ways to produce such-and-such molecule of interest.

Biotechnology does too, except you get you get to pester your Green friends by gifting them petri dish full of GMOs.

There's a difference. You cannot, or at least have a hard time, doing anything Biotechy to get a chemical without Organic Chemistry's help, but Organic Chemistry is less efficient at production.

Basically, chemists work on manual, nudging each chemical to work their magic until they get the molecule they want, Biotech uses essentially tiny, natural, self-regulating biological robots to do the heavy lifting and rewarding them with delicious nomnoms. Or operate on different levels altogether, if DNA or proteins are concerned.

@Objective (because large post with multiple quotes):

Medical. #1 goal would be figuring out how to reverse aging-related damage, but that's a lofty goal. I'm thinking of doing my Bachelor's in a lab working with autoimmune diseases.

[timferius]

Ah, well. Different things depending on which desk job, I can go through the list of jobs I've done here:
1) Dispatch. I worked weekends, was kind of nice being alone in the building. I took in emergency work from our call centre and contacted our on-call crews to do the work, scheduling it in our systems. A lot of downtime on this job, but when it was busy it was hella busy.

2)Locates: Basic rundown, when anyone wants to dig, you need to contact all utilities in the area and get them to locate and mark any underground stuff they have (pipes, wires etc.) so that you don't dig it up. So this job I was ordering locates for all our work. This involved getting the work outlines from our crews, faxing it out to all the locate companys (my old job is easy now that they've mandated all utilites run their locates through a centralized system called OneCall. Basically instead of faxing to 5-10 different companies, you email 1 and they do the rest). After faxing it was tracking the requests, following up (no one finished them on time....) and packaging up the final forms to send to the crews.

3. My current job, this is basically fixing all the mistakes people make in our system. It's a lot of data entry, problem solving, and emails. Basically, if info is input wrong in our system, it can error out, I manage those errors and correct them, which can mean tracking down who did the work, or sending people out to verify numbers. On top of that I manage our cases from the call center. If they can't handle an issue, it goes to us, and I distribute accordingly. It's hard to go in to much more detail without breaking down how all our systems work... it's not complete drone work though because of the problem solving, which is good because I haven't lost all sanity yet.

[Yoink]

Okay, Google isn't helping on this one.
What is it called when you have a tiny bit of fingernail sort of split off, poking out between the nail and skin on one side and causing quite a bit of pain? And, since I'm asking questions here, how the hell do I fix it?!
I've had this happen a couple of times lately and it is pissing me off. They seem to get better after a while, but I'd rather fix it now.

[Frumple]

Pretty sure that's a hangnail.

I... don't think it's exactly the right thing to do, but I usually just, y'know. Pull it off/out. Hurts, bleeds a bit, then it goes back to normal.

[Yoink]

Oh gods. Pull it off?!

[Helgoland]

Don't do that, it'll make things worse - try cutting/biting it off as short as possible, then ignoring it.

[FearfulJesuit]

I want one of these, but I want a Canadian version. Anyone know where you can get really tacky patriotic Canada shirts?

[Levi]

I found this:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

, but not on a shirt.  You could probably get it on one with one of those "make your own shirt" places.


Maybe this from zazzle? 

[FearfulJesuit]

Needs a flying moose.