Woah! How many degrees are you doing??
Maybe I don't understand the american system, but what is your main course? Are you taking the creative writing and psychology as stand-alone courses, with the computer stuff as your main course, or what? Cos for example my degree was called Computer Engineering, but that consisted of (in 4 years) about 50 different single-semester courses such as basic programming, advanced programming, networking, signal processing, engineering maths etc. etc.
Or is your degree a combination of all the subjects you mention?
Once I understand I can prob help more...
Either way, you are right that hardware specialists are in demand - this is because programming is easier to get into so everyone assumes it is an easier thing to do as a job and thus there are loads more programmers than hardware specialists. When talking about hardware, if you mean hardware design, then most hardware these days is digital, and in electronics, a lot of design and development is done in hardware description languages like Verilog and VHDL. Europe uses mainly VHDL (which is what I learnt) but I am told America likes Verilog - they perform the same purpose. So learning a hardware description language (HDL) is a good start - well actually, that should come after you understand what the hardware is doing (logic gates, flip flops, memory elements etc.) The HDL can be used to program chips then you are off to a good start for hardware development.
Doing a doctorate in hardware? Hmmm - I dunno, I don't see much research at universities for hardware in general - you'd have to go into a specific area - optoelectronics for eg. and develop new lasers for eg. for optical communications, or go into communications and develop new modulator chips, source coders etc. whatever - you see the point I'm making, again the hardware is a tool, the research is into the application, communications is hot at the moment, and you develop the hardware for a purpose.
As for programming, the main language in general use is C++. C is still used for embedded hardware programming because of its power at directly manipulating hardware and memory at a low level (low means close to hardware). Java is gaining popularity however, because of a) its platform independancy, and ease of programming -it hides all memory allocation complexities from you, but because of this, you can't choose when to allocate free memory etc. Also, because it runs in a virtual machine, it runs much slower than C++ code - my preference is C++ but it is harder to learn. Your choice, but the concepts in C++ and Java are the same, so perhaps if you've done no programming, start with Java to teach you object oriented concepts then move to C++ (C is a subset of C++).
Programming should not be seen as I career, but rather as a tool - at the moment I'm doing wireless ad hoc networking research but need to program in C++ to create simulations, so it's a tool, general skill you need anyway.
I have no idea about psychology, sorry.
As for creative writing, well it is hard to make a career out of this - you need to be a very good writer and have a good imagination - however the course will do wonders for your writing and trust me writing is very important in any computer/hardware related area as well - most people neglect writing skills but a lot more people will appreciate your work if you can write a good, interesting report. Ok so this would not be CREATIVE writing, but either way it's a useful skill.
As for how long things take, well in england a basic bachelors degree is 3 years plus a very minimum of three years for a PhD. But I'd do a masters before your PhD to get a better grounding. English bachelor degrees are notoriously short however, and a student from almost any other country will do a longer degree and thus learn more. The other extreme is China, where I've heard that a bachelor is 4 or 5 years and the masters is another 2 or 3, can't remember.
The whole area of computers is huge though, if you do a general course on it, you might find yourself getting into anything from networking to AI to graphics programming, to compiler engineering, to programming language design etc. etc.
Anyway, I'll write more once you give me more info on how your degree works etc.
[ 01-18-2005, 08:27 PM: Message edited by: Vaskez ]