Very loosely, you can think of "Linear Algebra" as "the type of math that computers are really good at". For this reason and others, it's really heavily used in

Very loosely, you can think of "Linear Algebra" as "the type of math that computers are really good at". For this reason and others, it's really heavily used in many of the most interesting sub-fields of software development: ML, statistics, HPC, etc. It's also a topic that most people are unlikely to pick up on their own, even if they are somewhat motivated. Working through the exercises in a math textbook doesn't give most people the "feeling of accomplishment" feedback loop that e.g. playing with a new web dev framework does. For those reasons, I would highly recommend taking it in college, because the structure and commitment mechanism of a college course will help you get yourself through the material. One major caveat: In my opinion, courses that only cover pencil & paper "theory" exercises are much worse than courses that have a combination of pencil & paper work and problem sets that require the use of software tools like Matlab, Octave, or Python/NumPy. In the real world, you're always going to use software tools for the actual number crunching, so it's extremely valuable to get familiar with actually using them. It can also help you on problem sets in your other courses - using Matlab or Octave on your laptop is much faster and more pleasant than keying numbers into the matrix interface on a TI-84!