I’m considering a computer science minor, but in most of the courses I see, the total credit hours are quite short, and you have courses like “Introduction to CS” taking a large chunk out of them, which I’m assuming is a very basic class. I’m really not sure how much programming a minor is going to offer, and whether the scope of this programming is practical enough for say, making a game as a hobby, much less actually creating software. If I want to get the programming knowledge for making applications, do I really need to bite the bullet and take a double major?
Depends on what courses are in the minor. However, most CS major curricula start out with all the programming courses and then move into theory of CS. If you just want to learn how to code, you don’t need the upper level theory classes, although they do create a deeper understanding.
I just graduated with a CS minor to accompany my neuroscience major.
Whether to do a double major or a minor I think depends on what you want to do with it. For me, I wanted to go to grad school for bioengineering, get a grounding in CS concepts to I could learn to program will on my own, and get some theory in AI/robotics to help with my research. I was able to get all of that in a minor. My goal wasn’t to look for programming/software development jobs with my minor. But I was surprised to discover I was actually qualified for many positions, and was contacted by a recruiter at Google for software dev.
If you want to learn more programming, a minor is fine. If you want to go into it as a career, obviously a major is a better choice. But in my experience, if there’s flexibility in the minor, you might be able to make it meet your needs.
What constitutes a minor varies considerably from one college to another, much more so than what constitutes a major. So the value of such can vary greatly.
My daughter wasn’t thrilled with the course list for a CS minor at her university either, so she plans to continue learning programming on her own through free online courses and materials.
^ That’s what I ended up doing it for math. The classes for a math minor didn’t align with what I was interested in, so I just took math classes as free electives.