Most important and useful CS courses?

aegrisomnia
Fri, 17 May 2013 11:13:33 +0000

I was a TA for my university’s “Objected Oriented and Advanced Programming”-esque course, and I tend to think the material covered in it is pretty useful. I haven’t read your course’s description, but my guess is that it covers UML and basic software engineering process. If that’s what the course covers then, frankly, you probably don’t need the theory you’d get in Software Engineering.

Also, definitely consider the programming languages course. There’s a lot of material there that might not be covered elsewhere (although you might find a fair amount of it in the compilers course). This recommendation is particularly important if you think you may go on to get an advanced degree in CS; the material is more-or-less obligatory for most PhD qualifying exams and the CS subject GRE.

Taking all three of OS, Networks and DB gives you a pretty strong “systems” focus, which is fine if that’s what your interest is. If you really want to run with this focus, consider trading out some of the other courses you’re thinking about for Graphics and Compilers. EDIT: I wasn’t really much of a systems guy, which is why I tend to recommend other more “fundamental” courses instead.