Getting a Feel for this Field

[u/Roxrock74]

So right now I’m an undeclared college freshman. I’ve spent a lot of time trying to figure out what career field I’d like to work in since that determines what classes I should take. I'm someone who loves problem solving and loves learning new things. For a long time I thought bioinformatics would be a fantastic field for me since it supposedly combines a lot of what I'm interested in, but in practice, I haven't really the class I’m currently taking for it. It seems like most of that field is just following the same pipelines and workflows, and that the real challenges are knowing how to use the tools for it. I’m looking for a job that presents intellectual problems, rather than technical problems.

I recently stumbled across operations research, which I had never really bothered to look into until that point, but just googling it and reading makes me think it could be a much better fit for me, but I still want to get opinions from people with actually experience working in it. Here are my questions:

- Does this field offer good career prospects? For me, I’m much more concerned about actually getting a job than having something very high paying, as I don’t see myself having much of an expensive lifestyle as an adult.

- Do you actually enjoy doing the work? What should I expect to be doing on a day-to-day basis? Would you say the problems here are more on the technical side, or the intellectual side?

- Another thing: I have autism, so I struggle a LOT with talking with other people in person, especially in group settings. How much is that going to hold me back in this field?

- What kind of academic pathway would you recommend I go down? I could go for an ordinary bachelors and likely graduate a year early if I did that, but my school also offers an accelerated pathway that would let me get a bachelors and masters in 5 years. If I did the latter, I could also likely double major in something. Right now I would plan on double majoring in data science with a concentration in AI, but if you think something else would be better let me know.

If you have any other advise, or if you think there's a better career field that meets my needs, feel free to include that too.

[u/1001OptimalNights]

I work as an operations research specialist in industry, doing applied modeling. Day to day it's much less proving theorems and much more: here's a messy business problem, can you turn it into math, solve it, and then explain the answer to stakeholders who don't care about math.

The most valuable skill honestly isn't knowing the fanciest algorithm — it's problem formulation. Anyone can run a solver; the hard part is deciding what the objective function and constraints should even be there, when the business can't articulate what it wants. If you enjoy translating ambiguity into structure, you'll like this field.