No idea what to do for college...

Frigating

Thankfully I'm only going into 6th year now, so I don't have to really worry about the CAO for ages, but I won't have decided by then either. But here's the story. I do 7 honours including physics, French, applied maths, history, and dcg (and pass Irish; I could probably scrape an honour but it's just not worth the effort). Of those, my best and favourite are French and physics. As far as points are concerned I could probably get around 500-ish. But I don't know what to do in college. I've looked and the most appealing seem to be computer science, electronic engineering and physics. Those three things fascinate me. If anyone has any experience with those courses that they could share I'd much appreciate it. Careers-wise I haven't put much thought into it, but I figured if I do a course I like it will lead to a nice career (hopefully!).

spurious

Something in the Physics area and try to get an Erasmus in France to keep up your French?

PictureFrame

I have one piece of advice; take your time.

I'm going into my final year of a Psychology degree and am resitting the Higher Level Irish Paper next year as it's taken me 3 years to realise Primary Teaching is what I want to do.

Best thing to do is weigh up pros and cons of each course and evaluate. The undegrad you do doesn't dictate your future if you don't want it to. There's ways in and out of everything.

GarIT

If you keep asking you will be told many lies about computer science. There is a rumor that goes around that Computer Science is related to maths, and to be honest yes we use maths all the time in Computer Science, computers are based on calculators after all, the maths we use though is where people get it wrong, addition is used all the time, multiplication is used too, we even divide sometimes. So it's nothing like school maths. If you decide to go into Security you will need number theory, or you will need matrices for graphics but that's about it. Algebra is used in everything but it's easy, every program follows the format of if x=a do something and if x=b do something else.

Other people will tell you you need languages, but all you really need is to learn a layout and about 20 different keywords for each language you want to learn.

What computer science really comes down to is logic and problem solving, that is 90% of anything you will be doing. If you enjoy brain teasers and puzzles you will like CS if you don't you wont.

You probably heard the question about a chicken, a fox and some corn and you need to get them across a lake taking one at a time in your boat, well that is what CS like most of the time

GarIT

I should also add that electronic engineering and computer hardware are very similar.

There are some courses you should look into in NUIM as 2 years ago they have added electronic engineering as an option to their science and computer science degrees. (For some reason NUIM label it is engineering science and I suppose there is some engineering theory but it is electronic engineering, due to some f up it's listed in the handbook as engineering science but the engineering department and the lecturers giving the course themselves call it electronic engineering)

So what you can do in NUIM is do a general science degree and in first year you can do Physics, Electronic Engineering and Computer science, then you drop one or two of those to have a single honours degree in one of those of a joint honours in two of those.

You can also take computer science as a course and take physics and EE as options in first year, then after first year you can change course from computer science into general science and take one or two of the other two if you wish.

Frigating

Thanks all, especially GarIT. You're very helpful. I'd pretty much already decided on NUIM (should have mentioned that-oops) for a few reasons, but I hadn't considered a general science degree. I'll look into that.