OP, don’t cut the bologna too thin. Your kid could take a Gen Ed course in Psychology and decide that a deeper understanding of how the brain functions will be a much better complement to her interests in CS than math or cyber. Or take “freshman linguistics” and realize that it’s everything, all together, wrapped with a bow-- math, modeling, cog sci, and a tremendous asset for anything to do with AI or machine learning down the road.
Some of this stuff just cannot be mapped or planned ahead of time. And NONE of this needs to be a “minor”. A CS major who loves linguistics is just fine, even without “departmental approval”!
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My finance major will have a math minor, only because she took extra classes to help prepare her for actuary exams, and only needed calc 4 this semester to get the minor. My husband majored in communications and has a music minor, just because a lot of his electives and gen eds were music classes.
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The first college I went to had a lot of ‘Mud’ majors - water and soil. Almost all of them got extra majors in bio and chemistry as that only added 2 or 3 classes in each.
School I graduated from, CU, didn’t have minors (at the time). If you wanted to take classes in something else, take them. A friend thought she was double majoring in history and recreation. When she applied for graduation, alarms went off. That would have been a double degree, a BA in history and a BS in recreation. She would have needed 150 credits for that, plus she would have needed a foreign language for the BA. She took the BS and was told she could list a ‘concentration’ in history on her resume.
My daughter has a BA in history and a certificate in Museum Studies (it is an actual program, like a minor but in the history department so can’t get a major and minor). I suggested she get a certificate in grant writing from a local college and she told me she actually has that through her MA in history.
So, if the minor is easy to complete, do it. If it is difficult, see if there is a concentration certificate or something similar for the classes you need/want to take. I don’t think a minor will make or break a career, but it might be nice to have. (IMO, a foreign language minor would be ideal for most careers and life in general)
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