Computer Science & Linguistics double major. What classes to take?

College Majors
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I want to double major in Computer Science & Linguistics at Purdue University in Indiana. I would like to go into the field of computational linguistics, which requires an MA/MS or a PhD, so grad school is in my future and basically I just want to take at least a fair amount of classes in both majors that will really help me prepare for grad school and be relevant to my field.

For reference, this is the linguistics major at Purdue: https://www.cla.purdue.edu/students/academics/programs/pos/CPSLinguistics.pdf

and this is the Computer Science major at Purdue: https://www.cs.purdue.edu/undergraduate/curriculum/bachelor.html

In terms of the linguistics major, I will basically just have 3 electives to take. Now I’m interested in linguistics as its own field, and the reason I came to computational linguistics started with my passion for linguistics. There are many classes I could take that I would really enjoy out of that list of electives, but my thinking is that at the very least I’d like to take a ke Historical Linguistics because even though that doesn’t apply to CompLing as much as some other classes it does seriously fascinate me. Also, I know some computational linguists have worked on projects like the computational modeling of linguistic evolution over time, which sounds really interesting to me so maybe it wouldn’t be a total waste. In any case, I’m not entirely sure yet, and what I’m basically asking is what classes would be the best choice to prepare me for grad school out of those?

Now in terms of the Computer Science major, there are several different track options but the two that stuck out to me as being possibly relevant to CompLing are Machine Intelligence and Computational Science and Engineering. I was thinking about going the Machine Intelligence route, in which I’d probably take the following classes:

Data Mining and Machine Learning
Intro to the Analysis of Algorithms
Intro to Artificial Intelligence
Probability
Intro to the Theory of Computation
And maybe Compilers or Programming Languages.

The programming languages class interests me more, but I think Compilers might be important enough that I should take it anyway (this is one of my 2 elective slots for the track).

Any advice at all about what classes to take is welcome.

On a final note, in case anybody is wondering, I am pretty set on doing a double major and here’s why. I came to this field because I had a passion for linguistics, and an interest in computer science (which may grow into a passion once I get in the classroom, but I’ve never really tried programming so I don’t know yet). I can’t afford to skimp on the computer science side of things because it’d be harder to get into grad school and computational linguists are first and foremost computer scientists, so it’s pretty critical that I get as much CS background as possible here. Now as far as linguistics goes, there are 2 reasons I want to keep it a major and not a minor. The first and most important is that it is my first love and I will not be satisfied unless I get to study it in depth. It is the driving force behind all of this. And secondly, my grad school education which should prepare me for a career in computational linguistics may see me go down the track of a PhD in Linguistics with a concentration in CompLing, so I want to have a very strong foundation in linguistics as well in case that happens.

Alright, thanks for reading and thanks for your responses.

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What year are you in?

I know it’s tempting to try to plan everything out ahead of time, but for graduate study, interests often develop organically over time. If you haven’t yet taken any introductory courses in either area, or if you are just finishing your first semester of them, give yourself some time. Intro classes are designed in part to expose you a bit to different areas of a field. As you learn more about your fields, you’ll learn more about what classes are both necessary to do well and get into graduate programs as well as what classes are fascinating and feed the abiding passion you have to do work in those fields.

In order to get an idea of the first one, you might visit the websites of some top computational linguistics PhD programs and see what their recommended prerequisite coursework is. If you can find a forum where graduate students in that field hang out and chat or lurk you might glean that information that way. You can also talk to your linguistics professors, because they’ll know - especially if there are any computational linguists on faculty.

As far as interests - well, you don’t know what you don’t know, so to speak. Once you take a couple classes you will start to formulate an interest area, and those will guide the upper-level classes that you take. Also, it’s fine to explore a bit in undergrad school. I’m a health psychologist by training and I never took a single class in health psychology in undergrad, although I took classes in related subfields.