If you're only paying $40 a month for 25 years on a 120K debt, there will be more than 120K in debt forgiven. The federal government is tacking onto your debt each month you don't meet the interest on your debt.
Think about it this way. 120,000 in debt at a 2% rate is $200 in interest. If...
Yep, just felt your situation is close to something I experienced myself in the past.
As was previously mentioned, you really do need to have something that shines on your resume to get that interview regardless of career. Once you've got that interview, the most important thing to do is to...
I was in a really similar boat when I graduated in late 2007 with a math degree. My GPA was a 3.1, I had 2 actuarial exams under my belt, but just never interviewed well enough to get a job offer. I worked a terrible retail job for a few months, then entered a really local, easy to get into...
Yeah, network engineering isn't really engineering so much as what people might call network administration. Regardless, I wouldn't major in it. You're far better off choosing computer science in that case as it gives you the skills you need and then some.
Also, there's probably going to be...
Not that being an actuary would be bad, but you might just want to beef up your computer skills and open up the number of possible careers you can pursue. Although, I think that depends on what you mean by "beefing up" your computer skills. I think if you can program at the level of the 2...
There are a lot of jobs in IT that relate to network support/management and have very little to do with pure programming. That's why you see the mish-mash of people with different degrees everywhere. You don't need anything really formal so much as knowledge of how to navigate windows computer...
I graduated with a math degree in 2007 and wound up working at walmart through a combination of expensive law school tuition, a failed family business, and not interviewing very well. I spent a year there and made maybe 15K when all was said and done (I wound up in the store's accounting office...
I've always thought of comp engineering as a hybrid of comp. sci and electrical engineering. I think there are some definite pros or cons depending on how you look at it. It might be quite easy to get a general IT job with a comp engineering skillset just because you're that much more...
You should learn a programming language, it's just a certification exam isn't the best way to learn a language.
Build something. It doesn't have to be perfect or terribly complex (shouldn't be the garden variety stuff from an intro CS course though). Learn a language and make a program that...
Yeah, I have a few IT certifications myself (microsoft, cisco, sap). Microsoft was required by an employer for a job I previously held. SAP is also requirement for my current job and my employer paid for, but certifications in general aren't going to help a ton. At least not the way...
As discussed, you might want to reconsider why you need/want a masters in computer science from a US program. It's good practice in general for everyone to only enter programs when you know what you need/want from them (Otherwise, it's always more worthwhile to work).
Web development and...
I think it would be tough to enter a US masters program in computer science without at least having knowledge of data structures and algorithm analysis. You need to learn lists, stacks, queues, trees, heaps, hash tables, etc, as well as how to analyze an algorithm's "running time" based on the...
I have had a job in networking, gotten the CCNA myself (along with a masters in comp sci) and I agree with all of what's been said so far. I read a few books for about a month one summer while I was doing independent study in school,took the exams and passed. What's sad is that we have a bunch...
There's probably millions of paths you could go down. In general I think it would be hard to pick exactly what you might like being so young. But at its core CS research is probably the same as most other fields. You don't really have to know exactly what you want to do when you start, but...
If you can afford an extra year it's worth it just to pull that GPA out of 2. land. Still, physics probably isn't what you would want to take to do that.