I used to be a Criminal Justice major. I decided to switch gears to a career in CS and hot damn, everyone is on my case.

Even if getting help earlier may have led to you having a better life right now, please don't completely blame yourself for not getting help. It can be very very difficult just trying to get help, much less work through the actual issues.

I spent my first couple years of college not really knowing what I wanted. Wound up in chemical engineering and discovered that I absolutely hated it. I had to fight to transfer into a spot in my school's CS department despite having only taken one CS course and never having done any outside coding before/during my time in college. My family desperately wanted me to pursue medicine and felt I was wasting my life trying to go into software. For about a year it felt like I really only had a couple of my friends on my side. But now I'm graduating in the spring with a 6 figure offer to work as a SWE and I love what I've been doing. Please do everything in your power to avoid becoming discouraged. It is definitely within the realm of possibility for you to make a fulfilling future for yourself here.

All of that being said, do try to give as honest of an appraisal of your current self as you can. To be transparent, I should acknowledge that I had a few advantages compared to you; I have been fortunate enough to not have issues with mental illness, and I've always been pretty good at math. You hopefully know your situation and your limitations better than anyone else, and maybe all of the other factors in your life are just aligned in such a way that this isn't feasible right now. Only you can be the judge of that. But anybody telling you that you shouldn't pursue this solely because the world 'doesn't need more CS grads' is just wrong in my opinion. If you can truly evaluate where you are in your life right now and think that you are capable of this (which I know is very difficult to determine with certainty!), then I believe in you.

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