Hey there, I am Anonoz, class of 2017 from information system (IS) specialization. Never heard of that? Because it is gone before you studied reproduction chapter in SPM biology.

Choosing a specialization is extremely crucial for your academic and career success, I can’t stress enough how important it is for you to give it a fair amount of delibaration, SWOT analyses.

Once you have picked one and commit to it, it will become your life, you will write it on your CV, everywhere you go, you need to tell people in the industry you specialize in game development, software engineering, wrecking database (I mean IS), or data science. If you picked game development, you can only do game development, other doors are closed for you.

Just kidding. The truth is, whatever specialization you pick right now, does not really matter down the road. It won’t even show up on your degree certificate.

But if you seriously want an answer here, it’s easy: pick the one you think you will enjoy the next few semesters the most.

Curious about game development? Do it, even if you won’t use them ever again after graduation.

Want to make sick amount of money because data science is hot? You don’t necessarily have to pick data science specialization. You can either do FYP related to data science, or pick it up yourself from tons of tutorials and free courses online, concretely: Coursera, Udacity, CS231N, etc.

You probably have a few questions by now, or more like the questions I made up but I insist you to read them:

1. What do I put on my resume/CV when looking for job?

Just put “Bachelor of Computer Science from Multimedia University, Malaysia”.

Why? Because any specialization in early stages of career is a limiting factor. And HR outside don’t know and don’t care about what is being taught in MMU, all they know is MMU students on average are pretty OK, and you know computer science - great!

You can find resources and samples from your seniors on https://resumetcd.herokuapp.com. Credits to Danny for maintaining it.

2. I don’t know what I like to do, I just want to graduate, get a job, move on with my life.

Pick the easiest specialization - SE. Study well and pass the exams on first attempt.

GD and DS don’t earn their reputation being tough for nothing. I barely passed visual information processing subject when it’s first being offered.

3. If specialization is not at all important, why don’t FCI abolish it altogether and just let us pick whatever electives we like?

I don’t know.

As a matter of fact, I am very against the idea of specialization, I would love to pick whatever subjects and electives to study, without being committed to it on paper.

4. Which specialization fetches the most money?

Singapore.

5. Which specialization fetches the most money IN MALAYSIA?

Chances are, they are the real specializations you can’t study in bachelor’s level.

You have heard about those: SAP consultants, Red Hat consultants. Or cross-disciplinary works like using data science to build high frequency trading bots.

Go back to previous points: just pick a specialization that piques your interest and get it over with. You can study the real specialization you find interest in during or after your school.

You have decades of career ahead of you, you can even switch out of IT/CS if you like.

6. Blockchain?

It’s too nascent as a CS subfield. But if you are interested in it, I suggest you to:

Take computer security elective to understand cryptography, preferrable taught by Dr. Ian Tan. Read and understand Mastering Bitcoin.

Don’t jump into coding Solidity for Ethereum dapp development yet, otherwise you are merely using a blockchain, not understanding it. Bitcoin isn’t hard to understand once you have the right fundamentals.

For the record, blockchain development is very active in Malaysia:

Etherscan, the largest Ethereum blockchain explorer is based in Shah Alam.

CoinGecko is the No. 2 coin market aggregator after coinmarketcap.

7. What really matters then?

If you mean getting a job outside Malaysia:

Getting your resume read.

Be impressive enough to get interviews.

Passing interviews that involve live coding, whiteboard algorithm solving, behavioural questioning.

They are covered in https://resumetcd.herokuapp.com bottom section.

If you just want to be in Malaysia:

Show a bit of interest in companies.

Passing interviews.

8. What are YOU doing now, after school?

Mostly web development, did a bit of DevOps (modern marketable term for sysadmin) to run web server cluster on AWS. Moved to Singapore, hit a snag, currently in KL again.

You can read up my resume if you really curious.

9. You didn’t answer my question!

My bad, hit me up via e-mail.

10. Thank you?

You are welcome.