How to choose your University Degree: A Data-Driven Approach
The choice of your university degree is one of the most fundamental choices of your life, and it is indeed one of the most difficult. Not only it will influence your happiness during your university years, but it will affect the job you will end up doing and your success in life. I have been in this situation many times: from the choice of my Bachelor’s Degree to the choice of my Master’s Degree, and also when I had to chose what to do in my two semesters abroad.
After some years passed, I can confidently say that all of my choices turned out to be successful. If I look back at the process, as a Data Scientist now, I can say that even without knowing, I took a Data-Driven approach. The job of a Data Scientist essentially consists in predicting the future from past evidence, and in my opinion, this approach will lead you to make the most confident decision you can take for the choice of your University Degree.
When asking for advice about what University Degree to take, the answer one hears most often is “Follow your Passion!”. The fact that you are passionate about something is seen as a strong predictor of how successful you will be on that subject at the university. There is a big problem with that: it assumes that the University treats subjects the same way you are used to.
The truth is that very likely, your idea about a particular subject is just wrong.
In my early days as a freshman in Computer Science, I met countless colleagues that enrolled in Computer Science because they were good at fixing computers, or just because they loved to play video games: you can imagine their disappointment when professors started to talk about calculus and programming.
Another point is that, very often, how you perceive yourself as successful and unsuccessful at something is strongly related to your teachers and colleagues.
To get rid of all these biases, the first thing you should do is to understand how the subject you have in mind is taught. To do this, check the websites of some institutions offering that degree and check what exams you are supposed to take. This will avoid nasty surprises.
Once you have a list of exams, you should carefully check what they really are about: if you read that you need to take calculus, it doesn’t mean that the teacher will start working on fancy integrals from the first day. You might be surprised to see that the professor will start with few classes about basic algebra, and that your beloved integrals will appear just at the end of the whole course.
Very often, you will find this information on the page of the courses. There, you will also find the recommended books and, if you are lucky, lecture notes from the classes. If you can access some of the books for free, you might want to give a quick look at their index or quickly read the introduction of some chapters, in order to understand how contents are presented.
A powerful tool to understand how classes are taught is YouTube: it provides recorded lectures for every possible subject you can think of. Among the most useful channels for this particular aim, I suggest you check MIT OpenCourseWare, Harvard University, and other channels of top institutions, since they provide the greatest amount of content.
While this may seem a lot of work, you are not supposed to go through every single book for every single subject: it is sufficient to quickly go through lecture notes of the main 3–4 courses for each Degree, but of course, the more informed your decision will be, the better.
After looking inside a degree, you will be much more conscious about what is most suitable for you, but there is one more step that is necessary: to get your hands dirty.
Once you have a degree clear in mind, the only way you can understand if it is for you is to just give it a try. You can do this by dedicating some of your free time to study the content that is usually provided in the first 1–2 months of a course.
Get a book, or find recorder lectures on YouTube and get your hands dirty!
If you will be able to dedicate some of your free time to study the subject you chose consistently for at least a month, and be successful at it, then you will know what it feels like, and you will know that you will succeed at it.
To sum up, these are the steps I suggest you do to make the most mindful choice about your degree:
- Find the list of exams for the degrees you like.
- Quickly go through lecture notes and/or indices of the books of the main courses.
- Find recorded lectures on YouTube and have a look at them.
- Choose the degree you feel is the most suitable for you.
- Study the material from one of the main classes for 1–2 months.
My personal experience:
As a practical example, I will provide you with my experience in the choice of my Bachelor’s Degree. I was in the fourth year of high school, and I was studying Classical subjects (Greek, Latin, Philosophy, etc), but I felt my true passion was Computer Science.
I also felt that I did never actually practice Computer Science, since I never had classes on programming and I was studying very little maths at my high school.
At the end of that school year, right before the summer, I said myself:
“I will buy one of the best programming books out there, and I will dedicate some of my free time to study it during the summer. If I will be able to make it, during a hot summer in the south of Italy, surrounded by family and friends, then I will know Computer Science is the way to go.”
At the end of the summer, I had studied more than half of the book.
I enjoyed it, and I was able to complete most of the exercises provided, without having ever taken a proper Computer Science class.
Then I knew it was the right choice. And when one year after, I started going to university, it felt like the most natural thing in the world.
No nasty surprises, no pains, no uncertainties.
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