Junior & Senior CS Curriculum Plan for UIUC - Realistic?

GLOBALTRAVELER
Fri, 04 May 2012 16:33:37 +0000

As a software engineer for 20+ years…

YOU DO NOT NEED TO MAJOR IN SOFTWARE ENGINEERING (B.S. or M.S) to be a software engineer. Software engineering is a METHODOLOGY that will be learned on the job through your various employers and clients.

All you need is ONE software engineering course (an overall broad one) at the undergrad level and that is it.

A degree in CS (or Math with the CS core courses) with ONE overall broad software engineering course is all one needs. Taking full semester courses for each of the phases of software engineering (requirements, design, development, testing, etc) is really a waste of credits. Take those credits in the CS electives that have been mentioned many times (usually by UCAlumnus) like database systems, networks, computer security/information assurance, computer graphics, parallel processing algorithms, data mining, etc.