if you think those dont matter you probably shouldnt go to college

really? He's only 18 and still has a year left in high school. I can't imagine a major gaming company is going to give a crap about what you were doing at 17 if your an excellent coder/designer/whatever at 23 and beyond.

That said getting a good job at a gaming company probably would be difficult. Make it a goal and go for it, start learning some programming over the next year in your free time. Even if you don't end up with a job at a gaming company you'll still have the skills to do something else in the CS field.

therein lies the problem. it's not about what you have on your resume at 17 but rather the skills to do something more useful while in college. unless the program is specifically tailored to the job you want, 70%+ of your classes will not teach you much stuff that's relevant to getting your job. you will have to spend a lot of time learning how to do it on your own. if you're not learning it on your own before you picked your major, the odds you'll spend even more time in college learning it outside of classes are pretty slim.

keep in mind that MANY college grads apply for the few gaming jobs available. you'll be competing with people who already made apps (iphone games, android apps, flash games, etc), have high gpas, have certifications, etc. and if you do get the job, the pay is relatively low for the work/stress.

A love for computers and games does absolutely not guarantee that you'll like the way they are developed and designed. That process is very, very abstract, and 90% of the people who work on it don't ever do anything other than code, code and code.

Just start your computer science studies, and find out what aspects interest you most.

thank you
appreciate the inputs, definitely will consider these things when choosing my major.

is coding really that bad?

nobody in this thread said coding is bad. who told you that and why do they say it's bad?

to see if you like coding, you really need to try it. i'd recommend starting with SQL, either postgres or mysql since they're both free. SQL is one of the easiest and useful programming languages so imo it's a good starting point. you can alternatively try making a website, but that involves much more time investment since you have to learn html/css before you can do any real coding (javascript/php/java/etc)

/edit: here you go, you dont even have to download anything. spend a few hours looking this over and trying it out.

http://www.w3schools.com/sql/default.asp

This post was edited by carteblanche on Sep 17 2013 06:39pm