Computer technologies have come to shape our world and are involved in virtually every sector of contemporary society. As a result, computer science is one of the fastest growing fields and looks to stay that way for the foreseeable future. With a computer science degree, you could find yourself working at a wide variety of organizations, assisting in the development of software, the maintenance of databases, or the creation of websites. There are also career opportunities in other fields, such as finance, law enforcement and design. Software engineering is without a doubt one of the fastest growing industries, and it is one of the best career options for computer science majors.

When Doron Hazan '21 was drafted into the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) after high school, he had the opportunity to join the army's intelligence unit. It was the obvious choice for the self-described "math and physics nerd" from Kiryat Shmona, a small town in Israel's Hula Valley just south of the Lebanese border. But Hazan was not one to make obvious choices. "All of my life I've been interested in human behavior," says Hazan, a junior who is enrolled in one of MIT's newest majors: computation and cognition, or Course 6-9. Launched in the fall of 2019, Course 6-9 is a joint curriculum offered by the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences (BCS).

The only exposure Yancarlos Diaz had to computer science during his high school years in New York City was when he used a computer to write essays. When it came time to apply to college, Diaz, who says he was good in math, "blindly signed up" for the computer science program at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), figuring it was a major that would help him easily find a job when he graduated. That decision already is paying off. Now a fourth-year student at RIT, Diaz expects to graduate in 2021 with dual bachelor and master of science degrees in computer science (CS). He then plans to work in the private sector as a software engineer "mainly to pay the loans," he says.

Six titans of industry stood onstage at MIT's Kresge Auditorium yesterday, assembled to speak on a panel about artificial intelligence (AI), including David H. Koch Institute professor Robert Langer; Helen Greiner, cofounder of iRobot, the Bedford-based company perhaps best known for its line of autonomous vacuum cleaners; Xiao'ou Tang, founder of computer vision startup SenseTime, which last year raised $1.2 billion in venture capital at a valuation of more than $4.5 billion; and Eric Schmidt, former executive chairman of Google. The discussion capped off a three-day celebration of MIT's new Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing, which will offer its first classes in physics, economics, biology, economics, machine learning, and related disciplines this fall. The panelists shared thoughts on a range of topics, but one they repeatedly touched on was entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurs, Schmidt argued in his opening remarks, drive the economy -- they're spigots for ideas that form the basis of industries. "[Founders are] people who are filled with a vision -- something they care about -- and they personalize it, they believe in it, and they convince others to follow them," he said. But, he said, they're in "need [of] more juice."

A Google engineer who got fired over a controversial memo that criticized the company's diversity policies said that there might be biological reasons there are fewer women engineers. But top computer science schools have proven that a few cultural changes can increase the number of women in the field. In 2006, only about 10 percent of computer science majors at Harvey Mudd College were women. That's pretty low since Harvey Mudd is a school for students who are interested in science, math and technology. Then, Maria Klawe began her tenure as president of the college.

Not enough women are going into computer science. "I remember walking into one of the classes at Stanford and just deciding not to take the class because I was one of only three women there, and I just felt so intimidated," recalled Catherina Xu, one of the co-presidents for Women in Computer Science at Stanford University. Incidents like this are happening all across the country, and partly due to the lack of women in the field, there is now a shortage of computer science majors -- and it's going to get even worse. By 2024, the National Center for Women and Information Technology predicts that there will be 1.1 million computing-related job openings, and only 41% of those jobs will be filled. And get this: The percentage of women in the field has been declining since the 1980s.

The delights of computer programming can be a tough sell to many students -- particularly girls. "If you walk into a roomful of middle school girls and say'Do you want to learn how to program a computer?', "But if you walk in and say'Do you want to learn how to tell a story and make a movie?', all the hands go up." That's one reason why Dr. Pausch is so excited about a groundbreaking deal announced earlier this month in which video game giant Electronic Arts has agreed to donate the animation for characters from "The Sims" to Carnegie Mellon for use in a novice programmers' course the school has developed. Electronic Arts, Inc., headquartered in Redwood City, Calif., has sold 58 million copies of "The Sims," making it the best-selling video game of all time. Players can choose characters, build and furnish houses for them, and take care of them as they interact with each other. Carnegie Mellon will use the Sims characters in its "Alice" course, which is designed to make basic programming more palatable to students by allowing them to move animated figures around on the computer screen rather than writing abstruse lines of code. Alice, first developed a decade ago, already has its own set of animated characters, which Dr. Pausch described as "the best we could make with our own two hands.

Organizations like Code.org are working to expand access to computer science and increase participation by women and underrepresented students of color. The technology world has a diversity problem. A recent U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) report found that the high-tech industry employed far fewer African-Americans, Hispanics, and women, relative to whites, Asian-Americans, and men. The difference is especially glaring in Silicon Valley. At Google and Facebook, African-Americans represent just 1% of the tech work force.

Andrej Karpathy is holding a classroom full of Stanford grad students and undergrads rapt with his description of the pros and cons of different kinds of algorithms used in training a neural network to recognize objects in an image. Suddenly, from the middle of the room, the distinctive artificial voice of Apple's Siri pipes up: "I'm not sure what you said." Siri, probably activated accidentally, draws big laughs. In this room, where students are deep into the intricacies of learning how to make software that better understands humans and our data, the error message is a reminder of the technology's exploding real-world applications. As a consequence, the students in Karpathy's class are likely to graduate into a favorable job market.