<p>So I will be attending Stanford in the fall and was also taking a look at the majors in their engineering department. When I looked at the 4-year plans for their computer science majors, they were broken up into several different tracks:</p>
<p>Could someone please explain to me what the differences in these tracks are and where they lead to? Which track would be best suitable for a job in Silicon Valley for companies like HP, Google, and Yahoo?</p>
<p>Also, I am going to be a pre-med and I can see that this is quite doable with the overlap in the biocomputation track, but would I be able to complete my pre-med requirements with the other tracks?</p>
<p>As you might have seen, every CS major has to take a “core,” which includes classes like 107, 109, etc. as well as the School of Engineering requirements like math and physics. After the core, you have to take a track - each one has different classes (you can see them on the CS site), some of which allow you to have a kind of interdisciplinary focus. Since it’s all CS, they all lead to the same kinds of CS jobs that students typically have after graduation. Obviously, some of the tracks lend themselves better to certain jobs than others - like biocomputation might be useful to a biotech company; AI to a wide variety of companies like search engines; HCI to most companies whose user interfaces are important; graphics to, say, animation companies; and so on. HP, Google, etc. hire people from all the tracks, mostly because Stanford CS graduates are considered extremely valuable and also because these companies always do work in all the areas described by the tracks. Of course, CS majors go far beyond just tech companies, even to non-technical jobs, and I think all the tracks would get you through the door there.</p>
<p>You could do pre-med and CS with any of the tracks; it’s not unheard of, but it’s not exactly common. CS is a hard major, period, so it can be difficult to maintain a really high GPA as is required for med schools.</p>