A confused senior high school student not knowing what course to major in in college

Hello there! I'm currently in my senior year of high school and I will be applying to university towards the end of this year (I'm from Singapore so our semesters work differently)

Anyways, I've always had a very strong affinity for media-related design. Growing up I drew a lot, edited tons of videos, taught myself Photoshop, FCP and After Effects for fun. It stimulated me greatly. In school I was always in charge of designing various posters, scored 90+s for all of my design projects (I ended up going to a 6-year long art school integrated with the IB program). I majored in visual arts and then switched to film last year to develop my collaborative skills. I also learned HTML and CSS on my own, started out making free themes on Tumblr and then went on to intern as a digital media designer at a small firm and built several static websites for my dad's clients. I really, really enjoyed web-development and I knew right off the bat that I wanted to specialize in a web-design/development sort of field as a career.

The problem is, I'm not really sure what to do in college. I'm conflicted between majoring in computer science, HCI or UX design. My teachers feel that I should do computer science for job security and because it's more 'in demand' and there would be greater flexibility. The issue is I'm not sure whether I can deal with learning 4 years worth of algorithm and computer theory, since I haven't really been exposed to programming outside of web development and maybe some niche game dev stuff. I'd much rather go into a design/UX/HCI field because I'm also interested in learning about both the psych and business aspects of technology and design, and I feel that majoring in computer science wouldn't allow much exposure to those things outside of the heavy theory stuff. I've read some of the posts here and according to some of you, the safest route is to major in computer science first and pick up HCI/UX etc in grad school. I'd do that, but 1) I can barely afford to go to college, I can't even imagine having to pay for grad school on top of that 2) I'm worried that I may end up not enjoying computer science and put myself through 4 years of torture

At the moment I'm looking at the SCAD BFA in UX design because I attended a fair where they set up a booth and talked me into it. It sounded really interesting to me, but as far as my UX/HCI school-related info goes that's about it. I've been looking more into computer science majors because it's waaay more abundant. I would really appreciate it if you guys (since you have more experience) could enlighten me on which major I should pursue and the best schools for UX/HCI design you can think of at the top of your head so that I can look into them further since there isn't a lot of info provided online.

Thanks! (PS: I'm looking into overseas universities, preferably in United States or Canada)

Posted Apr 26, 2017, 5:27 PM UTC · edited

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