CS/CIS Dual Major

College Majors Math/Computer Science Majors
1

I was considering dual majoring CS and CIS/MIS/IT (which, as far as I know, are the same thing). I’m wondering if this is viable (I’m fine with spending large amounts of time working, I barely have a social life anyway) and, if so, whether you guys would recommend it.

Thanks!

2

A CS grad can handle the technical parts of an IT job better than an IT grad, whose major is typically mostly business.

3

But is a double major viable?

4

Whether it is possible depends on your school and the number of required courses for the majors and general education requirements.

Why not just major in CS? If any of the business-type courses in the IT major are of interest, you can take them as electives.

5

I’m sorry for continuously posting here, but information on all the various tech degrees is less common than you’d think on the internet and I’d like to have some idea of what I want to do before I discuss it with my counselor and get his input.

Final question: what do you think of employment options for Business Majors specializing in IT Management or Information Security Majors? Also, thanks again; I’m not sure what I was thinking about double majoring there…

6

Business majors… being responsible for the security of computers? Sounds scary. Anyways, I still think your best bet would be to just go for a CS major. At my institution there are various concentrations (one of them being information technology), although all CS majors still need to take the same core courses (e.g. object-oriented programming, data structures, algorithms (?), more math…).

7

Okay, thanks for your input everyone. CS seems to be the most in-depth of all the majors, so I’ll look into it. While on that topic, what ARE the specializations for a CS major? I did a search and found http://cs.stanford.edu/degrees/mscs/specializations/, but is that general or only specific to Stanford?

8

But often reality.

Anyway, IT is mainly about managing computers and their software, while CS is about designing computers and their software.

An undergraduate CS major will take junior/senior level courses in many of the areas listed; at the MS or PhD level, CS majors will do more specialized study in one of these areas. (Of course, the specialty areas may vary somewhat from one school to another.)