Why You Should Study Informatics

…if anything at all

Are you one of the millions of students trying to choose which major to follow at university? Are you looking for the next step in your career? This article is for you. In it I will explain why I believe you should consider studying informatics. The first four points focus on you, and personality traits that might indicate you’ll enjoy informatics. They are followed by three points about why informatics is extra attractive to do.

(Informatics is described on wikipedia as “a broad academic field encompassing computer science, human-computer interaction, information science, information technology, algorithms, areas of mathematics (…), and social sciences that are involved”. Many universities instead teach the similar fields of Information Studies or Information Science; as far as I know these are equivalent. [1])

You’re a generalist, not a specialist. You’re intelligent, but you don’t excel at any speciality in particular. You may not be a social butterfly, a mathematical whizzkid, a design visionary or a seasoned businessman but you can do alright in all those areas and you can work together well with all kinds of people.

You’re interested in information technology. Perhaps you’re obsessed with gadgets, or you’re interested in the way that organisations use and distribute information. Maybe you’re intrigued by how your favourite website works. Perhaps human-computer interaction interests you. All of these are signs that informatics might be for you!

You’re curious. You often wonder, how does this work? Why does that work? How should these work? This is probably necessary for any university study, but for a generalist one as informatics, your curiosity shouldn’t be limited to particular fields.

You want to make your favourite site better. Okay, a degree alone generally won’t guarantee you’ll get that one job you’re dreaming of. But if you can visualise how your favourite product — be it an app, game, iDevice, website etc. — could be improved, chances are you have the potential to exert vision over other products too.

It’s fun and easy. Yes, easy. I’ll be honest here. Note that this is just my personal experience (and that of classmates), and ymmv. But if you are just like the person I described above — who, by the way, is me, hi! — you can do well enough with less than average effort. And in reality you’ll do better than just ‘well enough’ because you’re motivated and enjoy it. With every new class I take, even if the teacher sounds incredibly boring, something in my mind screams yes, I want to learn this.

It also helps that you may have time for some exciting side projects, volunteer work etc. too. Many motivated and ambitious students in this field are happy to spend a lot of time on jobs or their own projects in the same field.

(Though difficulty level is mostly defined by personal perception, some majors are indeed known as particularly hard. I can’t see informatics being one of them though, not here in Amsterdam.)

The world needs you. There’s a high demand for graduates in this field and this demand is expected to continue growing strongly. This means there are excellent job prospects and other benefits ahead.

Besides a good amount of vacancies to choose from at larger companies, the skills this study gives you can also help you start a startup if that’s where your ambitions lie. [2]

You can be influential. Those who work in this field are responsible for the visible and invisible decisions that are behind all the great technologies all consumers and businesses use: websites, programmes, operating systems. This field is an upcoming one, and is still taking shape. The decisions of today will help mold the future.

Why, on the other hand, should you not study Informatics?

You can learn in practice. As a university student, I have no experience here myself, but I hear it again and again. For a start, there are great amounts of information online, even complete courses. Especially in the field of programming there is a huge amount of tutorial sites and other online learning materials available. And perhaps the best way to learn about business would be to start your own. So if you prefer to learn in your own way or simply don’t have the money to go to university, don’t despair — there are other options, and employers will often not care whether you have a degree or not[3], so long as you can do what they want you to do.

You don’t fit the description above. Indeed, if these points don’t describe you, this is probably not for you ;)

So what have we learned?

What strikes me most about the depiction of potential informatics students above is just how many people it describes. I think most students have a much wider field of interests and abilities than their major delves into. And how many of us wouldn’t be interested in learning about all those great things our smartphones and laptops do? Conversely, how many of us haven’t seen, and even been forced to use, a website or program that makes one grumble and think, “this could be so much better”?

Many of us, too, go to university but worry about the low employment opportunity. I believe that Informatics could be the answer for a large chunk of these people. And yet there’s a shortage.

And that’s why I wrote this. I hope it helps some choose their next step in life, and who knows, it might even help the world just a little bit to pull the supply/demand ratio straight.

If you like what I write or if you want to talk to me, find me on Twitter. I’d love to meet you there!

Bart Sturm is an Information Science student at the University of Amsterdam who frequently volunteers for the university to help high school students decide on their major.

[1] My study is in Dutch, and my university translates the name of my major to English as “Information Studies”. However to me, the Wikipedia description of “Informatics” feels closer to what I do.

[2] Indeed, I believe that the current startup hype is at least a small part of the reason why the supply of employees in this sector doesn’t meet demands. It means that a lot of the best potential employees are instead working on a startup, that will probably fail, and that will otherwise need employees itself later.

[3] This is often true even if they do explicitly ask for them in job postings — many companies ask for them mainly to filter out potential applicants with no relevant skills. That might, however, differ between countries, and between companies. If you’re considering taking this course, I recommend doing research into the situation in your area.