Is this a good major to set myself up for a Data Science position in the future?

I will admit that I have a bias as a currently work in a "business analyst" data science role, but writing papers and delivering them to senior management (VPs, Directors, General Managers, C-suite depending on the company) can be fun. Being invited to strategy meetings and being the go to guy for providing the data portion of high level strategic decisions is exciting to me. On the other hand, I can imagine there's a huge sense of pride and accomplishment in the "I built that" emotion that comes from the engineering side. Along with the flexibility to be able to create your own start-up when you have a strong enough CS / software engineering background. Despite writing a lot of code at my job, I do not consider myself a developer or engineer. I'm the sole user of my code. It manipulates data and performs complex analyses. I have compiled java for Pig and Hive jobs, I've used Python and R extensively, I've used Apache Spark in both Python and Java. I've written more SQL than I know what to do with and I have a library of bash scripts for processing text files. I've used most of the popular NLP libraries and I've analyzed raw twitter feeds. I've made some fun visualization in d3. However, building an android or iOS app is far beyond my skill set, and I certainly do not have the engineering chops to try. Hell the only reason I manage to get some the above done is that the engineering team graciously put up with my shit and builds Hadoop clusters and manages my compute resources for me. (Along with a considerable amount of trial and error as I bumble along with the help of google and stackoverflow).

My advice is no matter which major you end up choosing take the classes that seem interesting to you. The economics and business classes will be surprisingly helpful on the engineering side and the CS classes will be helpful on the analyst side.

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