QotD: Education, Occupation

What was your major or field of study in college? Did you wind up working in that field or using that degree? If not, what field have you wound up in?
Submitted by sneuf.

When I was growing up as a child in Hong Kong, I was fascinated by the education programmes the government put on the TV in the afternoon. I kept watching the same maths and science programmes and amazed by how science seems to have an answer for every questions, or at least seemed that way to me back then.

So when it was time to pick the subject to study in university, there was never a doubt that I wanted to study physics. (Chemistry and biology are for wimps who can’t handle the maths!) I was (and still am) pretty handy with maths but some of the more abstract stuff bores me 🙂 Unfortunately this applies to physics too and when the last year of the course came around, I was more interested in computer programming than quantum physics, thermodynamics, and solid state physics.

But the analytical skills that the physics course had taught me had left me in good steed. It was exactly the right type of skills to have at the right time when I graduated. The computer industry started looking for scientists and engineers for programming jobs instead of just computer science graduates because we were perceived as more rounded.

So here I am, working as a software engineer with one of the leading edge software company in the US. Can’t be that bad, huh? I bet my uncle, who was actually a proper physicist and advised my parents against me studying physics, would have to eat some humble pie too.