<p>I'm a senior in high school and I plan on double majoring: Computer Science and Mathematics.</p>
<p>My question is, is this a good idea? Is it worth it? What are some of the overlapping courses?</p>
<p>There are not a lot of actual overlapping courses except for perhaps calculus, linear algebra, and discrete math, though CS theory and cryptography courses may be allowed for applied math majors, and math courses in algebra and number theory may be useful for CS majors interested in cryptography.</p>
<p>Double majoring may be easier if both majors are in the same division (i.e. it may be more difficult if CS is in an engineering division and math is in an arts and sciences division).</p>
<p>The answer to your question varies wildly depending on the school. At some schools, students can double major and comfortably graduate in 4 years. At other schools (like my own alma mater), double majoring is a feat few can accomplish in less than 5 years. Some schools – especially smaller schools – offer very few elective courses and therefore encourage students to pick up minors or double majors. Larger schools tend to offer a wide variety of courses and encourage students to increase depth of knowledge rather than picking up additional majors and minors.</p>
<p>Employers don’t care about how many majors or minors you have. Employers only want to know that you have a good grasp of the fundamentals and that you’re not a raging *<em>s</em>hole.</p>
<p>Like Mokonon said…the answer to your question varies wildly depending on the school. Some schools (like U-Illinois Urbana) have a lot of overlapping Math/CS courses where there are a good 5 or 6 upper-division courses that are offered jointly by the Math and CS departments.</p>
<p>But then…</p>
<p>At other schools, those same courses are offered by just one of the departments and not the other. Since you are a HS senior, you may not yet know the types of university classes that “overlap”, they are usually the “numerical or computational” versions of your foundational college Math courses like:</p>
<p>(numerical or computational) Analysis
(numerical or computational) Linear Algebra
(numerical or computational) Differential Equations (ordinary or partial)</p>
<p>Others that overlap Math & CS are:</p>
<p>Junior/Senior-Level Discrete Math courses in Combinatorics and Graph Theory
Linear Programming/Optimization
Cryptology (mentioned earlier by UCBAlumnus)</p>
<p>Some colleges have several tracks within the CS department that you can take for the major. My daughter’s schools offered a math/cs, applied math/cs, econ/cs, computational bio in addition to the straight up CS.</p>