Computer Science Careers and Subfields

in this video I want to focus on computer science careers and different fields in the major my other computer science videos I focus mainly on the curriculum cuz it's often not what people might imagine but I didn't really focus on careers you can get into and what you would do after college so let's get started now as a computer scientist there are many specific job titles you can acquire including software developer computer systems analyst Network systems administrator database administrator web developer and security analyst now there are more but I'm going to focus on these and then I will go into areas of computer science like cryptography computer graphics bioinformatics and more so a software developer is probably what you imagine a computer scientist as it's someone who of course develops software they write the code that makes various types of applications do what they need you may help develop the online shopping software when it comes to Amazon and Walmart you could write the computer graphic software for video games you could write the software that Banks use to help with the management of funds in people's accounts they can transfer money for example you could help Write mobile applications which have basically an endless amount of possibilities you could help with software that's used for doing taxes or that tracks your money you could write antivirus software you could work on Adobe Photoshop or paint or the operating system your computer's using or really anything else that comes up on your computer honestly really anything on your phone and computer as well as some other devices need software developers to make I found hundreds of examples in honestly a trouble picking which ones to put in this video but as a software developer you could write code test your code search for bugs and much more for a variety of applications software developer is actually one of the very few jobs on the Bureau of Labor Statistics that has more than a million jobs and is growing at a rate faster than most other jobs I'm not saying this field is right for everyone but you could say it's definitely not a bad choice next a computer systems analyst is someone who evaluates and optimizes an organization's computer systems these large systems that businesses use will differ as you look across various sectors like Finance insurance and Healthcare this person would have an understanding of hardware and software but usually you would not be doing the hardware or software development itself like writing the code or designing the hardware they might oversee the installation of a new system and then troubleshoot the system once it's operational or they could calculate memory and speed requirements to ensure the system is optimized again this field has large employment and a very fast growth rate at the moment and a high paying salary other ways to get into this though include Computer Engineering or information systems as a major then a network systems administrator would monitor computer networks like local area networks or wide area networks for a business or organization again you probably won't be really writing code but more working with the physical computer networks themselves they may have to monitor Network traffic evaluate software and hardware install firewalls make sure the network is easy to access for staff troubleshoot Network problems and more then a database administrator handles database maintenance and security whenever you store your shipping address or a username and password it's put in the company's database which consists of long tables and entries it's crucial that these databases are safe from hackers as they contain sensitive information so a database administrator would make sure this information is secure and back up existing information in the case that something happens they would optimize existing databases and deal with any breaches or bugs in the system again they aren't really doing the initial programming and writing endless amounts of code but more working with the already created software and the physical databases to run tests and troubleshoot then web developers of course focus on the development of solely websites this person is doing a lot of programming but whereas a software developer might work on something like Adobe Photoshop or antivirus software web developers Focus only on websites you may do the front-end programming which involves programming things that people can see and interact with on a website like where a button is implemented the layout of the page what pops up when you press a certain button a drop- down menu making it userfriendly making sure the website works on various screen sizes and more and for those who are curious HTML CSS and JavaScript would be languages used for this but then another web developer may do the backend programming this is where you program the things that people don't see like if you go book a hotel room you interact with all the front-end stuff but when you press the button to book the room and wait for it to process what's happening in the background is it's processing your credit card it's putting your name and information in their database so it's stored maybe it stores your login info and more none of this you see happening but someone had to program all that to happen quickly safely and efficiently and lastly a security analyst serves to protect a company's network from cyber attacks and security breaches now again they typically don't develop the software that is used to protect against the attacks but they might install software such as firewalls and then run test that assess how secure the system is especially for companies involved in banking and finance it's crucial that these companies stay ahead of hackers and have very secured websites now I'm going to go into various areas of computer science and what kinds of jobs and careers you can do in each these are more specific so they might not all be abundant in opportunities but I want you guys to be aware of what opportunities are out there so one topic I've talked about already is artificial intelligence where you may develop algorithms and software that can turn text into spe or allow a computer to beat a human in a complex game or instruct a self-driving car on what actions to take but I'll provide links to those videos that I did on this topic cuz those go into much more detail now the next one is cryptography this is basically about encrypting information so that if someone intercepts the data they won't be able to decipher it if you hacked a company's database like Facebooks and came across the password information for its users you may see that the passwords look really weird well those aren't the people's actual passwords that are encrypted so even if someone hacks the database and has the usernames they can't just use that information to log in the encryption is designed to be very difficult to decrypt back to the original word or phrase companies like Facebook or apple need to encrypt their data to protect our sensitive information this is especially important when inputting credit card information and passwords I found a job listing at Hulu for ensuring the security of their internal and external applications which included cryptography there was another listing at Bank of America where you'd have to understand and Design cryptographic Systems as well as stay up to date with emerging threats to the industry then there's computer security which is also known as cyber security which is more about stopping things like viruses and malware it's about firewalls Access Control intrusion detection and more rather than just encrypting data again this could apply to nearly any company large companies like Target and Home Depot have been targets of security breaches that compromise customers credit card information self-driving cars are also going to need more and more security cuz it's possible for them to be hacked government organizations obviously need a secure sense of information I even found a job listing as a forensic computer analyst for USPS to perform analysis and experimentation on security systems or even the systems that are used to control traffic lights need to be made so that they are safe from cyber threats then a unique area of computer science is bioinformatics this is where you develop software that is used for understanding biological data this is something your school may offer electives in within the computer science department bioinformatics techniques are used in genetics and genomics to help in sequencing and annotating genomes it's used for analysis of Gene and protein expression it can help in simulating DNA RNA and proteins and much more if you want to dive into this field you'll learn more about biological Concepts though so if you enjoy biology but also want to go into computer science programming algorithm design and so on this might be a good field for you you can dive into it in a M program after you complete a bachelor's in computer science or maybe you could just jump into the workforce and maybe a company will train you on the biology side of things bioinformatics companies would include biodiscovery Inc Mac vector or genomatica and cancer research software for molecular biologists to speed up and improve the analysis for DNA and protein sequences and algorithms and software to analyze and interpret genomic data now the next area is computer Graphics this Feld involves things like image processing and computer vision and is very applicable for special effects for movies and TV and also video games now there's way more to computer Graphics than you may realize how you program the software to reflect light for example using various algorithms can greatly change how a computer image will appear how Shadows are cast and light is reflected is actually a challenge within computer Graphics I know this looks just like a light turning on and off but that's not what's happening look at the light and notice that it stays on all that's changing is how the light is being reflected off surfaces if you don't program how light is reflected properly you get a much darker and less realistic image and there's also more math than you may think when liit surfaces a lot can happen including reflection transmission and refraction will to determine how much light is given off or reflected from a certain point x there's actually some math and physics there's a crazy looking equation called the rendering equation which can be used in a program to determine how much light reflects through a room and this can apply to movies or video games now this isn't the only method for dealing with reflection and lighting when it comes to computer Graphics but I just included it to show you that it can definitely be a math heavy field compared to what you may think so it's not like everything is just digitally drawn in like if you physically drew a picture then yes you have to manually include all the lighting but with computer Graphics they incorporate the physics and math into the program to do the lighting through an algorithm and the software if you generate a room and don't use certain algorithms you may get a picture like this which doesn't portray very good lighting but if you do use certain algorithms within the program that are made to add more realistic light by accounting for how light is reflected off various surfaces you can get a more realistic image where you can see more of the shadows and green light reflection in the back now I found a research position at Disney that involves using computer vision to assist in areas like 3D reconstruction and image and video processing this said it requires a Masters or PhD in computer science but something to be aware of although the math might not be as crazy as you saw above even for a company like Disney or Pixar employees say they are constantly using things like trigonometry linear algebra and even differential equations to make their designs come to life and don't get this confused with people out there who are more in charge of the art Behind these projects but don't deal with the physics math or programming so much these are two different fields now I'm going to stop there there are many more fields and aspects of computer science including computer networks databases computer architecture and so many more it's honestly hard to keep track of but just not that computer science is a very broad field even if you get a job at let's say Microsoft you could work on the Windows operating system the Xbox Microsoft Office applications and more which are all different but exist at one company or you could work at Google which hires lots of Engineers but is known for hiring computer scientists you can work on their search algorithm Google Maps Google docss Google Chrome Google brain and their artificial intelligence programs Google translate and so much more so even if you work at one company for a while you can constantly be doing different things now it's important to also note that a lot of computer science majors start off in software engineering or development jobs but you shouldn't get too tripped up on the labels or what the job is called focus more on what you specifically want to do in fact if you do a search for computer science jobs the majority of jobs you'll see come up are titled software developer software engineer or something very similar but these jobs differ a lot now as a disclaimer you don't need a computer science degree for everything I've listed in this video some jobs like artificial intelligence research or that Disney research position said they required computer science or at least a similar degree but when it comes to a network systems administrator many software developer jobs security analysts and so on their listings included many things like software engineering computer engineering or even information systems on top of computer science these differed for the exact job but it wasn't just computer science that was required then you also hear of people who are self-taught attend boot camps and more and Achieve programming or software developer jobs so keep an open mind but hopefully this gave you some guidance if you like this video don't forget to comment like And subscribe and I'll see you all next time

Channel: Zach Star

Views: 467,825

Keywords: majorprep, major prep, computer science, computer science careers, what is computer science, computer science subfields, computer science jobs, jobs in computer science, careers in computer science, csc jobs, major in computer science, computer science major, college, careers, jobs, day in the life of a computer scientist

Id: 2VpDcjFshJI

Length: 12min 57sec (777 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 21 2017