If you're the kind of person who "likes to make things" and is going to college, you basically have two options: art or engineering. As a teenager I was totall

If you're the kind of person who "likes to make things" and is going to college, you basically have two options: art or engineering. As a teenager I was totally turned off by engineering. It seemed like a bunch of dudes who wanted to discover the best way to make something, but with a total disinterest in why that thing should be made. The art (and design) people seemed to get it. They were intensely curious about the bigger idea, and wanted their output to connect to some visceral and/or moral and/or political outcome. So I wound up in an art program. I learned how to make aesthetically satisfying objects and was exposed to a ton of cool things that have happened in art history. Later on when I got into software, I came to it with a mentality of wanting to make "things" that were in some way complete and satisfying. That turned out to be enough of a motivation to learn programming, and it turns out the demand for software is insatiable regardless of your background or skill level. So if I were to talk to someone who was going into school, I would tell that person to do what excites them, and suggest that STEM doesn't really deserve to have a monopoly on creation.