Re: programing with science jobs

On Sat, 10 Nov 2007, artem wrote:

Hi all,
i am a senior in high school and next year will be going to college. i
want to major in either physics and/or mathematics or electrical
engineering. i was wondering if i will be working in one of those
field will programing be helpful or not. do i need a basic knowledge
of programing or a deeper knowledge of programing.

For physics or EE, you _need_ a basic knowledge of programming. Even if you write no computer code as part of your work, you need to be able to read computer code. The ability to design and write simple programs will also be useful, even if you rarely do so as part of your work.

However, jobs in physics/EE can also be very dependent on computational work. This doesn't mean that you would necessarily be doing a lot of programming, since you might be using a commerical finite-element package or similar for most of it, or some other pre-existing software. But a good knowledge of programming and sofware design and engineering is very likely to be seen by employers as essential.

Mathematics can require anything from zero programming to daily programming, depending on what type of mathematics.

Keep in mind that a knowledge of programming, by itself, is not sufficient to do computational physics/maths/EE. Programming is a tool used in computational science, and IMHO the non-programming elements are far more important. The required programming skills are also the easiest parts to learn. Courses in computational science, computational physics, numerical mathematics, simulation-oriented EE courses, etc. will all be more valuable than computer science or IT courses. The main mathematical tools will be numerical analysis (doing calculus on computers) and numerical linear algebra (doing vectors and matrices on computers). Pay attention the first time around, and you won't have to learn as much by yourself when the time comes to use this maths.

Some branches of EE are programming-oriented rather than computational science oriented (how do you get a robot to do stuff?), so if that's what you're interested in, ask around for advice on specific courses.

--
Timo Nieminen - Home page: http://www.physics.uq.edu.au/people/nieminen/
E-prints: http://eprint.uq.edu.au/view/person/Nieminen,_Timo_A..html
Shrine to Spirits: http://www.users.bigpond.com/timo_nieminen/spirits.html

.

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