Switching to computer science

As I was nearing the end of my third year of university I was contemplating the following options: continue on with my final year of software engineering or switch my degree to computer science?

The previous summer I had enjoyed an amazing internship at Trade Me. Over my three months there I worked as part of the team building the new frontend in Angular. It was my first time working with web technologies (my university programming up until this point was all in Java, and a tiny bit of C), and by the end of summer I was more comfortable using JavaScript than Java.

Coming back to programming academic assignments, where the focus was on creating solutions that ticked all the assessment criteria, left me feeling unsatisfied compared to the real world problems I had tackled during my internship. When I weighed up the prospects of an additional year of study versus working like I had during my internship, the latter was significantly more appealing to me. Plus, I would be earning money instead of adding to my student loan.

Another thing that concerned me was the requirement during fourth-year of software engieering at my university to complete a year-long research project. The course had a predefined list of projects that you would rank in order of preference with no guarentee that you would get your favourite. You would only be allocated your project after the cutoff point where you could withdraw from the course without penalty (so you couldn't decide to bail if you didn't like your project), so it was a bit of a gamble whether you would be stuck for a whole year with a project you didn't like.

With these factors in mind, and since all of the courses I had already completed pursuing software engineering also satisfied those needed for computer science, I was able to switch my degree without completing any additional courses. One quick trip down to the faculty office and I was going to graduate with a computer science degree.

It is now over two years since I made the choice to switch from a software engineering to a computer science degree. After graduating I was able to get a graduate role at Canva where I have been working for the last couple of years on exciting real world problems like I had during my internship. Ironically, my official job title is software engineer.

In the end it hasn't mattered that I have a computer science degree instead of a software engineering one, and I would argue that my degree is now largely overshadowed by my professional experience.