College Computer Science Curriculum for Jobs in Coding

Getting Started with Coding

What courses will you need to take in college to get a coding job? College CS courses offer a sweeping survey of entire computer systems from the hardware used to allocate memory to the high-level software that runs programs and the theories used to write that software. As a result, you gain a great sense of why computer systems behave as they do, which gives you the foundation to advance a technology or a programming language when the need arises.

This approach differs dramatically from the learning you’d typically do by yourself or in a boot camp, where the focus is only on software development in a specific language such as Python or Ruby. Given the typical 12-week duration of a boot camp, there isn’t much time for anything else.

The core CS curriculum across universities is similar. This table compares select core curriculum classes required as part of the Computer Science degree at Stanford and Penn State — a private university on the West Coast and a public university on the East Coast, respectively. Both have introductory classes to acquaint you with programming topics, math classes that cover probability, hardware classes for low-level programming and memory storage, software classes for designing algorithms, and higher level classes that cover advanced topics such as artificial intelligence and networking.

CS Select Core Curriculum at Stanford and Penn State
Course name	Course description	Stanford	Penn State
Programming Abstractions	Intro to programming using C++ with sorting and searching	CS 106B	CMPSC 121
Programming with web Applications	Intro to graphics, virtual machines, and programming concepts using Java	N/A	CMPSC 221
Math Foundations of Computing	Topics include proofs, logic, induction, sets, and functions	CS 103	CMPSC 360
Probability	Probability and statistics relevant to computer science	CS 109	STAT 318
Algorithms	Algorithm types (e.g., random) and complexity	CS 161	CMPSC 465
Hardware systems	Machine registers, assembly language, and compilation	CS 107	CMPSC 311
Computer systems	Storage and file management, networking, and distributed systems	CS 110	N/A
Operating systems	Designing and managing operating and system tasks	CS 140	CMPSC 473
Computer and network security	Principles of building and breaking secure systems	CS 155	CMPSC 443
Intro to Artificial Intelligence	AI concepts such as searching, planning, and learning	CS 121	CMPSC 448
Intro to Databases	Database design and using SQL and NoSQL systems	CS 145	CMPSC 431W

Until recently, universities generally did not teach web programming courses. As web programming has increased in popularity, this has begun to change — for example, Stanford offers a web programming class (CS 142) that teaches HTML, CSS, and Ruby on Rails, and Penn State has a similar class that teaches web programming with Java.

About This Article

About the book author:

Nikhil Abraham was Director of Business Development & Growth at Codecademy. In that role, he taught and trained thousands of beginning coders across a variety of professions. He helped refine Codecademy's online courses, which have introduced basic coding skills to millions of learners.