What is Computer Science?
Computers are everywhere and touch every aspect of our lives. Who doesn't carry a cell phone or use the Internet? Even more exciting developments are in our future, and computer scientists will play a crucial role developing small things and big things to make these computers work.
- Small things include the chips, wires and circuits that form the building blocks of modern computers.
- Big things include the Internet, the World Wide Web and the set of rules and standards that make them work.
- Computer scientists are architects -- they plan, design and organize
- Computer scientists are builders -- they write programs and build software systems that do all kinds of tasks.
- Computer scientists are thinkers -- they analyze which ways of doing things will be fastest and which computing problems can't possibly be done quickly, no matter how hard anyone tries.
Computer scientists study computers and computing to figure out ways to make them work faster and better and to solve larger, different and more difficult computing problems. Computer scientists are problem solvers who learn critical thinking skills and apply them to a variety of challenging problems at different scales and with different structure. These skills serve them well in all walks of life, not just in typical (but challenging and fun) computer science careers.
For more detail, Wikipedia contains a good overview of Computer Science.
