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Science and Computer Programming

 
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I am currently in high school and i love science and computer programming. I am at the point in my high school career where i have to decide what specific classes i should take to help focus in a certain area.
My question is: What jobs are there that combines Science ( Biology , or Chemistry ) and computer programming.
 
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My job: I am a researcher programming an application that calculates the radiation emited to a tumor in the radio therapy department of a hospital. It combines physics and computer science. Most of my collegeas have a degree in physics, computer science or chemistry. I actually studied both chemistry and computer science. So a research department is a possibility.
 
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Applied sciences mostly already have canned packages at their disposal, so there's not as much opportunity there. You may build a better mousetrap, but it's likely that if you do, it will have to be on your own time and money.

Areas that require modeling, however, inherently need new software, since almost every model these days is a computer simulation. There are canned modeling packages, but even then, it's not uncommon to have to write extensions.

Back in the heyday of the Commodore Amiga computer, some really good stuff was developed by Willy Langeveld at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. In his case, since the platform was so new, he actually made major contributions to the OS toolkit. He also contributed to the BeOS platform.
 
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Bioinformatics is a booming area that combines all three disciplines.

--Mark
 
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In the near future, you may find exciting opportunities in Solar energy technologies, e.g solar plastic, solar power, etc.
 
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I did my masters in Energy Systems engineering which deals with All sorts of Non renewable energy sources. In that sense can you give me some insight on how we would apply Programming techniques to the Solar world. Apart from modelling and simulation of Solar panels which currently is being done using Matlab Simulink, I do not find any real usage of Java (the one that I'm currently in) being applied to such a field. Though I posses the know how of Solar and experience in programming, I still could not match how one could apply programming to Solar world.
 
Marcel Wentink
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An interesting question would also be, if you want a job like that, would you study for example physics, or would you go and study computer science?

I think I would advise to study physics. I studied computer science after I studied chemistry. With chemistry I had the problem that I was not really good in the hand labratory jobs. The manuel accurate measure work, or how you would call that in English. (?)
 
Tim Holloway
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Originally posted by Jothi Shankar Kumar Sankararaj:
I did my masters in Energy Systems engineering which deals with All sorts of Non renewable energy sources. In that sense can you give me some insight on how we would apply Programming techniques to the Solar world. Apart from modelling and simulation of Solar panels which currently is being done using Matlab Simulink, I do not find any real usage of Java (the one that I'm currently in) being applied to such a field. Though I posses the know how of Solar and experience in programming, I still could not match how one could apply programming to Solar world.



It depends on how theoretical you get. Basic building-contractor stuff like "We can get 350W/m^2/day" from these panels so we need 10 of them to power this building is straight 4-banger calculator stuff. But the real push in solar research is in materials and in structural design - that can get you into some major math - even quantum physics.

I wasn't limiting myself to Java, since that wasn't explicitly part of the question. FORTRAN was designed for this kind of work, and even though it's older than I am, it still does well on supercomputers and where people who are interested in getting the math first and the UI second.
 
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If you are specifically interesting in combing those two,
I also think you make science as designate major and computer science minor or further study.

By the way, do you understand what you want to do is at least 10 years of further study?
 
Mark Herschberg
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Originally posted by Chris Hani:
By the way, do you understand what you want to do is at least 10 years of further study?



Um, I don't understand that it is at least 10 years of further study.

I can think of jobs in line with his interests taking 4 years of study for a BS.


--Mark
 
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