<p>When I was an undergrad at Michigan State, the math courses were what weeded out the CS majors. Back then, CS majors had to take Calculus III (multiple integrals & vectors) and Differential Equations…as well as Probability/Stats for Engineers and one extra 400-level math course.</p>
<p>I started off as an EE major and Electromagnetic Theory was what made me tap out in the octagon. There I was with a GPA not good enough to get admitted to the Engineering college but no interest in majoring in anything non-STEM.</p>
<p>…then Michigan State introduced the Computational Mathematics program. Different college (Science) so there was no 3.2 GPA required just to stay in the program.</p>
<p>It stripped away the theory courses (only requiring Advanced Calculus…aka Real Analysis-Light) and guaranteed you registration into at least Data Structures and Algorithms courses. It allowed me to pick the “hot” CS courses…the ones where the jobs were…databases, networks, graphics, operating systems and skip out of non-income generating topics like turing machines/theory of computation.</p>
<p>I still didn’t get high GPA but hell…I knew that the job world could not just hire only the 3.5+ GPA from Illinois and Carnegie Mellon so I was gonna get a job anyway. I didn’t care about getting 4K or 5K less. I put Mathematics/Computer Science on my resume and kept it moving.</p>