I'm a chemistry student and I have all sorts of interests and hobbies so I've been learning all kinds of things over the years but what has proved to be the most worthwhile things that I have learned are all computer and IT related things. The most useful skill I have attained over the years is programming. Last summer I decided to take a data entry job that my brother got me and it would have been the most mindlessly boring job I have ever done if I were to do it manually. Instead, I made a web spider that did everything for me. Took me days to program it but it ended up saving me weeks of time. Right now, I've been assigned a research project for my chemistry course and pretty much all I have been doing for it is programming because I could see from the start that I could save myself massive amounts of time by writing scripts to automate all the tasks I was assigned. The professor who gave me the research project told me about a task he does manually which takes him 2 days each time, so I wrote a PHP script which took me about 2 hours to make and now the task which used to take him 2 days, takes about 10 milliseconds. Literally. Now that I'm getting good at programming, I can program all kinds of things to do jobs that would ordinarily be massively time consuming.
Moral of this thread: you can't go wrong by learning programming, its one of the most useful skills you can have in life, especially considering the exponential rate at which computers and technology are evolving. Everything is becoming computerized so the demand for programmers is only going to grow exponentially with it.
