What should you study? Tech careers with a future in the Dominican Republic
Only 1 in 6 Dominican university students is in engineering, technology or the sciences. What each career does, how to start without a five-year degree and how to tell whether it's for you. What I tell students in my talks.
In every talk with students I ask the same question: “what are you going to study?”. I almost always hear law, accounting, business administration and marketing. Very few say engineering or cybersecurity. The country’s numbers tell the same story: according to the 2024 higher education report from MESCyT, the Ministry of Higher Education, out of 520,524 university students only 16.8% were studying engineering and architecture, information technology or the sciences. Business, health, the humanities, education and law added up to 67.5%. And in information technology, only 19% were women.
The country needs lawyers, doctors and teachers. But every company, every hospital and every school also needs someone who understands networks, data, security or automation, and there are still too few of us.
How I got here
As a kid I took apart fans, drills and game consoles to see what was inside. In 2014 I chose mechatronics because I felt robotics was the future, and I still think so. I started at INTEC and finished at PUCMM; I told the whole story in the El Pensum interview (in Spanish). If you pick the wrong university or the wrong path, you can fix it.
Careers worth a look
- Mechatronics: mechanics, electronics and programming together. Robots, factory automation and 3D printing. I explain it calmly in what is mechatronics.
- Software and systems: apps, websites and process automation. AI writes code, but you still need someone who understands the problem; we discussed it with Harys Vizcaino (in Spanish).
- Cybersecurity: protecting companies, governments and people from attacks. More and more businesses need it, large and small.
- Networks and telecommunications: fiber optics, radio, satellite and the internet. It’s what we do every day at Cosmos.
- Data and artificial intelligence: turning information into decisions and building the AI tools that are coming.
- Electronics and renewable energy: solar panels, power grids, microelectronics and the devices we all use every day.
You don’t have to start with a five-year degree
A technologist program gets you working sooner. ITLA, for example, offers technologist programs in mechatronics, cybersecurity, software development, networks, telecommunications and artificial intelligence, each about two years and four months long.
And if you’re still in high school, you can start today for free: the networking and cybersecurity courses from Cisco Networking Academy, freeCodeCamp for programming and Tinkercad for 3D design right in your browser.
How to tell whether it’s for you
- Try before you decide. Build something small: a web page, a circuit with Arduino or a 3D-printed part. If solving the problem hooks you, you’re on the right track.
- Talk to people who do the work. Tech Talk has stories that help (in Spanish): Georgy Marrero, who went from San Pedro de Macorís to software engineer at Facebook; Grey Guzmán, who builds a business from engineering in the Dominican Republic; and Albert Pujols of El Pensum, who advises young people on what to study.
- Don’t be afraid of math. You learn it with practice, like everything else. Nobody is born knowing calculus.
- Think about problems, not titles. The question isn’t “which career pays the most?” but “which problem would I like to solve?”.
Keep going
If you’re a teacher, a principal or a student and would like to bring the talk El futuro se imprime hoy to your school or university, write to me. The goal is to reach all 31 provinces.
