/sci/ - Science & Math

Is this even a question? Biology is by far and wide the easiest STEM major. People actually (and unironically) write their biology disseration in Microsoft Word.

>>10733958
>>10733952
Biology is wayy to wide of a term to use, zoology for example is simple while medicine and molecular biology is difficult

>>10733961
what about microbiology: like viruses or fungus? Is it more difficult than CS?

>>10733952
Why not do both?

>>10733966
No that's fun. The more slave work you have to do the harder it is. That's why molecular biology is the hardest.

>>10733952
Like everything, it literally depends on your school and concentration/career goals. Seeing as how TCS has contributed invaluable methods and information to genome sequencing, cell structures, modeling of behavior, and protein folding while bio hasn’t really contributed much to CS, I’d say that a proper CS curriculum (that is, a math undergrad and then PhD CS) is probably a much harder path. Keep in mind that many CS masters are garbage “I want a pay raise, teach me some extra stats and methods in codemonkeying / ML for industry” type deals, while the PhD is legit. In my experience, all the CS PhD departments you wanna go to either operate jointly with the math department (my advisor was in the math department and specialized in non discrete topics), or those which have very close ties to it. I’m sure a PhD in bio is hard too, but it seems to be less on the classwork / material (though some subfields are definitely exceptions) and more on creativity of experiment, procedures, etc.

>>10734282
can i do masters in math, and then CS phd, if i only have CS undergrad?

>>10733952
Biologists are getting automated.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robot_Scientist

>>10734499
Sure, especially if you want to do anything in theory CS or desu harder parts of CS.
OS and graphics are the most engineering type parts of CS (just look at CMU and Stanford graphics groups and what they do; the field is heavy on visualizations, scientific and engineering applications, etc), which are heavy on applied mathematics (graphics: mostly sigproc, lots of differential geometry, numerical analysis, lots of physics if you wanna do imaging, heavy amounts of analytic results; OS: sigproc, some pure topics for theorems and bounding, etc).

TCS proper runs the gamut of many modern topics in pure mathematics. It’s best thought of as a math department that gets funding from more organizations, and that should be readily apparent when you see who writes these papers, their collaborators, and the background - proposition - theorem - discussion format of their papers.
So yeah I think whatever you wanna focus on, mathematics will do nothing but help you on the path to a CS PhD

>>10734499
>>10734535
Oh that being said, only do the masters if you think your chances of getting into a program you want hinges on the work / topic you do in your masters. A PhD is funded, so you can study without thinking about repaying bills (past maybe TAing a class)

Biology before trannies and women infested CS, CS now

>>10734739
Sorry got that backwards, I meant CS is currently easier

>>10734744
Depends on what you mean by CS

>>10733958
>People actually (and unironically) write their biology disseration in Microsoft Word
Is this a bad thing?

>>10733952
I think that Evolutionary Biology, because basically you gotta make sense of all the shit found in other Biology areas. Its like the equivalent of Cosmology in Physics. Explaining how a system originated and evolved seems harder to me than just explaining how a system works.

>>10733952
Did both. CS by far harder.
Biology is literally memorizing a bunch of shit and regurgitating it for the test.
CS has actually hard problems to solve in university.

>>10735141
>CS has actually hard problems to solve in university.

>>10735153
Oh, you think I'm some codemonkey, huh?
Heh...
I read SIPSIR
Welcome to my world

>>10734739
Tfw no trannies in my class.

>>10733952
Why you care about if its hard and not what like the most? Hard for who? Biology is far more interesting imo, but if you like pissing contests, then go ahead and study what you think is the hardest if you think that will make you feel better about yourself.

>>10735141
Molecular biology has analyzing tons of qPCRs and Western blots as well as immuno precipitation and immuno fluorescent microscopy. Not alot of universities are offering this because it takes big brains and is way harder than biochemistry. You need a biochemistry grad student to be able to handle this which is bachelor's level for molecular biology

>>10735153
CS does have actually hard problems to solve, as a field. Lots of rich problems to study.
>>10735275
Read Wigderson, Sedgewick, Knuth, Barak and Arora, etc. They're better at expositing on more interesting CS theory, though the really interesting shit has yet to be collected from papers and turned into a tome. tl;dr read the papers.

>>10733952
It depends on the department, your interests, and the classes you take. And of course there's a lot of overlap. A shit ton of overlap, in fact. For instance, there's a lot of interdisciplinary stuff going on right now where we're stuff in decision theory, game theory, logic, and information theory that's really philosophically and empirically interesting and also relevant to CS and math. There's also a lot of cross fertilization with population genetics, migration, statistics, and computationally itensive modeling techniques that I think tie in with data science and machine learning. Im sure there's plenty of other area too. IMO though game theory, logic, and information theory is where it's at.

who cares how easy it is to get an undergrad

>>10735332
Algorithmic game theory is where it's at.

>>10734258
Most microbiology research these days is molecular or structural in nature. If you aren't torturing a protein you won't get funded.

>>10734519
Biology technicians maybe. I doubt actual scientists (i.e. experimental designers) are going to lose more jobs than other natural science fields

>>10735141
>t. undergrad who never did biology research and likely just took gen bio + genetics

>>10736016
Proteins are goddamn boring I wouldn't wish that on anyone

>>10734519
>retail
>automated
hah

Biology is much harder to get a job in so a biology degree is the more difficult choice.

Bioinformatics master race here. It's hard as balls.

>>10738267
The difficulty of the degree/research and difficulty of finding a job aren't the same thing. Competition means you have to have certain signifiers of success, but these range more in tedium and time than 'intellect.' Based biobro not having basic reasoning skills. Checks out

>>10733952
assuming you mean undergrad a gen bio degree is usually easier, biophysics and biomath are harder, cmol might be harder it depends on the institute and classes you take. grad level it can’t really be assessed

>>10738422
actually his logic is sound, just not in the way that that you specify. what he is saying is that since biology has a much more bleak outlook any competent student would desire to be part of the top paid 10% of biology students, as such if you want to do weel in biology you have to work your ass off, making the degree more difficult on the proactive student. On the contrary, since CS has a positive job outlook there really is no point in not half assing your degree, since it will result in comparable to someone who did extremely well, as such a CS degree is much easier since there is more room for failure.

>>10738504
that doesn't change that the degrees being compared are not equal in most instances, CS majors for however unimaginative and greedy they are tend to be smarter than biology majors and to have to do much harder course work for their undergrad. This is just comparing bio-CS w/out CS-Math. The difficulty of both is at parity around the point where math is heavily required for the bio degree but that is only a few tracks which some unis do not even offer, there is no point in trying to maneuver this to try to justify the fact that most bio majors are retarded and should not even be in school. You have to take a semester of stats, Calc I-II with a C average, 3 Orgo classes, usually a biochem lab and then do a little bit of research and take a sort of memorization heavy animal/plant physiology course and that's it for most bio majors and premeds. Its not really worth mentioning the other possible routes you can take as just with the TCS insecurity these are rare exceptions and a lot of the work is for grad students and elite advanced undergrads not for most people in the program.

cs is a meme, biology is more interesting, especially evoevo, molecular, biochemistry, embryology, evolutionary biology and ofc you could become neuroscientist afterwards and use math and physics

>>10738603
evo devo *

>>10736517
program a computer to do it for you

>>10738603
cs is a meme, but now that I have a degree in it might as well stick with it. Maybe I can help biologists (and neurologists) with their experiments in future research

>>10733952
>CS
>difficult

To get an average CS degree a person needs:
an access to a search engine;
knowledge & skill to perform copying & pasting;

CS, if we're talking half-decent programs here. But both are very doable if you apply yourself.

>>10733952
CS + BIOLOGY = BIOINFORMATICS = YOU WILL HAVE A WELL PAYING JOB

>>10738907
if i'm an undergrad in bio how should I get work in bioinformatics

>>10738907
>spending 6 years on a master's degree just to become a lab assistant

At undergrad level, CS can definitely be more "competitive", but actual intellectual rigor they are about the same. Anyone can finish a programming assignment and even algorithms/computation theory aren't terribly difficult.

Bio is, as others have said, largely memorization. Not many of the "concepts" (notice the quotes) are that hard. But bio is very broad and there are some actual tough/interesting subfields like biophysics and biomath.


>>10738907
>>10738411
Literally just statistics (albeit advanced) and "knowing how to code".

>>10738411
>>10738907
Good job wasting your time and effort.
You're gonna be neither a biologist nor a computer scientist, but you'll be mediocre at both of them.
A biologist and a CS guy is better than two bioinfornaticists.

>>10733952
Bio major. Easiest STEM there is. I'm a retard and I got my degree. The hardest part of undergrad biology was organic chemistry. Meanwhile CS majors use math I've never even heard of.
But I know grad students of biology are absolutely suffering so I would say that's the harder path, given that if you want an actual biology position you need more than a BS.

it is stem for brainlets, yes

>>10734282
>codemonkeying / ML
what does ML stand for here?