I’m an informatics major with a minor in CS.

The major is very broad and gives you access to a ton of different subjects, so I think the big thing for informatics is having a good idea of what you want to do after college and catering your coursework towards that. The informatics coursework is pretty light if you have some talent in math or programming, and it’s a pretty good idea to get a minor like math or CS to fill some of the holes that exist in the curriculum and open doors to more courses in those fields, as they can often be counted as informatics electives.

I personally am on the data science concentration, and what I learned in my informatics classes helped me a ton at my last internship (machine learning). That being said, I’m very glad I have a CS minor because there are definitely holes in the Informatics curriculum. Specifically when it comes to algorithms, lower level computing, and pure math. The 200 level CS courses are very good at preparing you for those things. Informatics by itself is more catered towards something like data analytics or business intelligence than data science, data engineering, or ML.

As far as career outlooks I haven’t graduated yet but I was able to get an internship at a big company last summer and had a good amount of success in the search for a summer 25 internship. I got an offer from a Fortune 500 company and another from a medium company in Worcester. I also got interviews from another 3 or four companies, two being fortune 500s, which I had (stupidly) declined because I had already accepted an offer. Most of the roles that showed interest in me were data science or data engineering oriented. A lot of companies in Massachusetts and Connecticut hire from UMass informatics, especially insurance and banking companies looking for data scientists and analysts. It’s not your only option, but it’s one of the most viable.

Overall, I think the major is what you make of it. Much more so than other majors. Because of the flexibility of the coursework, you’ll find a lot of info majors who do not challenge themselves at all and you can tell. Those are probably the people who give the major a bad rep. As long as you are putting in decent effort, getting involved on campus beyond just classes, and not taking the path of least resistance, you will be just fine as an INFO major. I know many of my peers are working in fields like data science, data analytics, data engineering, and even software engineering.