A similar strategy worked successfully for my friend. As a student, he was very enthusiastic about math and programming, but a big part of that was influence of his friends, me included. Later he saw evidence that he was in these topics, let’s say, above average, but not great enough. (He would be able to write simple programs, and he would get the job, but the more complex parts would be too abstract for him.) He tried studying informatics, and dropped out.
So he switched to economics, choosing some study that also included maths. Hanging out with different kinds of people he discovered he had good social skills (he didn’t notice that while hanging out with nerds). These days he is a consultant, and his specialization could be described as applying database tools to examine or improve economical stats of companies. (Imagine a huge company which has a lot of data in dozen different systems, including Excel sheets; those systems are not connected, they don’t even use a similar structure, and the company actually doesn’t even know which divisions or products are profitable. So my friend comes, and uses different tools to connect all those data sources together, and then creates easy-to-read reports. Which is not as easy as it seems, because those data sources describe the data differently, so he must examine the underlying territory to understand what can be connected with what. Also he must reduce all the available information into cca seven very simple graphs, so that even the most stupid managers could understand that easily.) So, he has some IT things there, enough to make him feel happy for living his dream of working in IT, but no lambda calculus or anything like that. On the other hand, travelling and debating with clients is okay for his extraverted nature.
A similar strategy worked successfully for my friend. As a student, he was very enthusiastic about math and programming, but a big part of that was influence of his friends, me included. Later he saw evidence that he was in these topics, let’s say, above average, but not great enough. (He would be able to write simple programs, and he would get the job, but the more complex parts would be too abstract for him.) He tried studying informatics, and dropped out.
So he switched to economics, choosing some study that also included maths. Hanging out with different kinds of people he discovered he had good social skills (he didn’t notice that while hanging out with nerds). These days he is a consultant, and his specialization could be described as applying database tools to examine or improve economical stats of companies. (Imagine a huge company which has a lot of data in dozen different systems, including Excel sheets; those systems are not connected, they don’t even use a similar structure, and the company actually doesn’t even know which divisions or products are profitable. So my friend comes, and uses different tools to connect all those data sources together, and then creates easy-to-read reports. Which is not as easy as it seems, because those data sources describe the data differently, so he must examine the underlying territory to understand what can be connected with what. Also he must reduce all the available information into cca seven very simple graphs, so that even the most stupid managers could understand that easily.) So, he has some IT things there, enough to make him feel happy for living his dream of working in IT, but no lambda calculus or anything like that. On the other hand, travelling and debating with clients is okay for his extraverted nature.