What Steps Should I Take for a Research Career in Computer Science?

[jd12345]

What kind of career path should i follow if i want a job whihc involves devising new and better ways of using computers and addressing particular challenges in areas such as robotics, physics and other sciences. I will start my undergradute course in CSE this year. After that what will i have to do? For research in areas like physics, robotics, maybe chemistry or biology what courses will have to take afterwards?

 

[MathWarrior]

If you really want to do research you should get your PhD. I would definitely recommend studying some mathematics if your intend to do research in CS as well.

 

[AsianSensationK]

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 you should aim at doing actual research. You can get an idea of what research looks like from interacting with others. You'll learn that from professors running research groups, people giving talks about the work they're doing, journal papers, etc.

I think just starting as an undergrad you might see if there are any research groups you can be a part of at your school or talks on CS research that you could attend. That would be a good start. See what people are studying and researching and figure out if you might like to learn more about that area as well. If you find an area you like, try to read some papers in that area, see if there are problems you might want to look into further, then see if a prof might guide you in an independent study or some undergrad research.

 

[Floid]

If you want to do research in physics you need to get a physics degree, if you want to do research in biology you need to get a biology degree, etc.

Robotics is the only one of the areas that you mentioned that a CS degree might really aid you in persuing (you might also consider a EE degree).

The reason being is that to do research in a particular area of a science, the amount of that science you need to know is much greater than the amount of computer science you need to know to write the programs to perform that research. So if you want to do robotics, go CS and focus on computer vision, AI, etc or go EE and do the same with some DSP and control system classes as well. But if you want to do physics research, then I would go physics and then learn to program on your own/take a few CS classes as electives.

Other classes you would want to take are applied math type classes where you learn numerical techniques for solving math problems.