Hello, I'm writing this article just for fun and there's no advisory things for problem solving.

I've been participating in many programming contest for more than 5 years, and I came to one question: what do competitive programmers major in?

Most competitive programmers would answer, "computer science" of course, "mathematics" (applied? I don't know much about that), or "engineering".Some of coders are still high-school students and they haven't decided their major yet, or maybe some people works after graduating high-school. But is that true that 99 percent of university coders are majoring in those subjects?

In fact, I'm studying about ecology and environmental sciences at the Faculty of Agriculture in my university (The U of Tokyo). I guess no other competitive programmers are from my faculty, even though U of Tokyo has so many red or yellow coders (as you may know).

Here's my story: I started competitive programming when I was a junior high school student. I was belonging to mathematics club in the school and my friends taught me about programming, algorithms and where to practice problem solving skills. Then I participated in domestic OI and a few years later I won a silver medal at IOI. At the same time, I've become interested in biology, and attended domestic Biological Olympiad things. On programming side, I was (and still am?) interested only about contests and I didn't have a plan to be engineer or researcher about informatics. Then, I'm studying about ecology now.

When I was a high school student and taking part in domestic OI, I met friends who would major the subject far from computer science, but most of them didn't keep solving problems or participating in contests. Even I'm not sure how long I can take part in contests (of course I want to compete in the contest as long as I can), but I think I may be the best competitive programmer from agriculture areas as long as I keep participating contests ;).

So today, I wonder how many coders from over the world are majoring such a subject, and want to know very unique majors you do or you did. Feel free to comment about coders' university majors.