I can’t remember how, but I ended up at Zencoder’s jobs listings:

Office Manager at Zencoder in San Francisco, CA:

What we’re looking for:

• You are the most organized and efficient worker you personally know.
• You take on responsibility before being asked just because you see that something needs to be done.
• You act with a sense of urgency. Why put off a task until tomorrow when it can be done today?
• You can manage 20 tasks at the same time without breaking a sweat. Experience managing an office is a major plus!
• You can handle confidential information with discretion and professionalism
• You can manage projects and stay focused without someone looking over your shoulder

I seem to fit those things, but I kind of panicked because I had to wonder if that’s all I’m a good fit for. There’s got to be something more to me than being a ‘mere’ office manager, right? I’d certainly like to do something more interesting than grinding administrivia to free up other people for more interesting things..

My last UCAS choice’s offer just came in, so I’ve finally got a deadline to respond to all those offers by, and it’s a pretty difficult decision. It’s not about choosing between those schools, and all the different cultures and approaches to Computer Science they have, it’s about whether I want to study CS in the first place, and whether it’s necessary to go overseas to do that, and if so, whether the UK is hardly the best place to spend all that money at on a CS education.

Questions, questions, questions..

1. Do I want to study CS?

My math sucks. Ugh, just thinking about the time and effort spent on Math HL which has since been lost..

Also:

Software Engineers Will Work One Day for English Majors:

Wages for new computer-science graduates working as software engineers are at, or near, the top of most surveys, certainly compared with new humanities grads. We hear about the gap a lot this time of year, as students compare job offers.

…

The downside? Well, say you interview as a graduating college senior at Facebook Inc. (FB) You may find, to your initial delight, that the place looks just like a fun-loving dorm — and the adults seem to be missing. But that is a sign of how the profession has devolved in recent years to one lacking in longevity. Many programmers find that their employability starts to decline at about age 35.

Employers dismiss them as either lacking in up-to-date technical skills — such as the latest programming-language fad — or “not suitable for entry level.” In other words, either underqualified or overqualified. That doesn’t leave much, does it? Statistics show that most software developers are out of the field by age 40.

Nothing against English majors (yet) but yes, longevity and career progress does seem like it can and will hit a ceiling sometimes. I’ve seen someone do largely the same thing over 6 years, with only a few bits changing: (i) he touches Slackware Linux less and Microsoft Office more, (ii) he gains a boss and a few underlings, (iii) he gets Senior prefixed to his title.

I imagine that in the 2 years since I’ve last seen him, he’s still in the same spot. Where can he go?

Conversely, is that a bad thing if he’s happy doing what he does? He gets to spend enough time with his kids and family, after all.

2. If yes, is it necessary to go overseas to study CS?

People like to bring up NUS’ rankings when discussing this point. I’d point out how annoyingly difficult it is to get any useful module information out of NUS (SoC), but I don’t think they’d appreciate that point.

At least SMU SIS provides a relatively clear and publicly accessible course syllabus (as seen here in their BSc (IS Mgmt) infopage), so they’re upfront that they’re a JavaSchool with grisly bits of Sharepoint thrown in ;)

It’s all a bit fantastical, the bit involving getting out of your comfort zone (read: far away from naggy people) and learning to live on your own. It might work very well or go horribly wrong. Travelling and seeing another corner of the world? Exposing oneself to even more varied people than merely Singaporeans? Experiencing the culture of another country? Shrug. Maybe all that is overrated.

3. If yes, is the UK the best place for a CS education?

Probably not. The US would be a better choice for this field.

The two major camps around me are either for staying or for going to the US. No one is pushing me to go to the UK, apart from people I know who are there (selfish reasons? or are they the enlightened ones?) and myself, because I think it’s a pretty nice place on the whole. At least they seemed pretty welcome to foreigners there.

(Apart from the weather, but hey, aren’t we all used to the wet season here, so it’s just a matter of the cold?)

4. What about something entirely different and not in IT?

I probably could do that. But apart from throwing darts at a list of courses, how can I decide what I want to study when I don’t have a crystal clear picture of who or what I want to be in 5-10 years time? I’m not the sort that has a firm conviction that I want to be a doctor/dentist/linguist so I can serve in the mission field or something like that. Good for those people, anyway.

I wonder how many of my kindergarten classmates who want to be firefighters actually will end up as one. Heh. We were all young once..

It might be a good idea though. I doubt there’ll be a shortage of technically proficient and extremely smart engineer/programmer types in the near future, as long as MIT/IIT continues to be very competitive for admissions. Conversely, what will we be short of soon? Hawker centre cleaners? Domestic help?

I wonder what other sorts of careers I’m suitable for. I can’t remember what the system that MOE licensed from UW Madison churned out for me, but I remember finding it funny.

It occurs to me that there are a lot of careers which don’t really have a mapping from degree to that. Like, how do you get into air traffic control? Or product testing/certification? Hmm.

Confusing. Evidently, I need to think a lot more about this before I make up my mind.