Hey guys! I was wondering what were the most difficult classes you took in college that were required by your CS major?So far for me it has been Physics 2 and Calculus 3, but I hear that machine learning and operating systems tend to be very difficult as well,so I’m terrified lol…
The two hardest courses for me were operating systems, and design and implementation of programming languages. Algorithms was also really difficult, and computer organization and data structures were rigorous, and many people struggled, but they were not that bad for me.
Calc 1-3 are the courses many people have struggled with.
Depends on what you mean by “difficult”.
CS courses with programming projects can be very high workload, even if they are not otherwise that difficult.
CS theory courses can be intellectually difficult for some people, even though they are not inherently high workload. Think of them as similar to upper level proof-based math courses.
Yes, it specifically depends on your interests and strengths. You might find a course to be very easy that the rest of us found challenging, or vice versa.
For example, I found my graduate-level algorithms and complexity theory courses to be fairly simple (of course, there are many open questions in these areas so it is not that simple).
On the other hand, I found some of my coding-heavy courses such as compilers and computer graphics to be on the harder side - even though the material is not too bad, they both had heavy workloads.
It was a long time ago, but Data Structures was the killer course in our CS program.