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Comment by jwuphysics | Hacker News Reader

Carnegie Mellon University offers a Software Engineering minor as part of their Bachelors in CS undergraduate program. As for the Master's degree, they already have one.

I think students have enough freedom to mold their own strengths and passions into the CS program here.

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When I was there, there was also the Information and Decision Sciences program. It was a little CS, a little economics, a dash of social science, and a pinch of management.

There was a two semester final year course that students had to take. In this course, project teams had to design and implement a software system for a local business or organization. While I had my own concerns about the formal curriculum, I always thought this capstone project was very good experience.

My alma mater has the same type of program [1]. It's a mix of CS, business, communications and finance. It's also a liberal arts school so you end up taking another ~60 credits outside of your major. You take the classes plus 3 semesters of the capstone project. For the projects, you start as a "grunt" and work your way into complete control of a project.

I was a Math/CS graduate, but ended up being part of the pilot for the program. I spent a semester plus a summer internship working for a local company dealing with integrating GPS tracking of public transportation systems. It was a cool hands on experience for what was then (2000) an emerging tech area.

[1] http://www.juniata.edu/departments/itcs/i4i.html

Sounds very similar to the Information Systems program, too. My girlfriend is pursuing a Business Administration heavy Information Systems program, whereas one of my roommates is about to graduate in a web-dev oriented Human-Computer Interactions and Information Systems double major. Yes, software engineering is a big and distinct field from Computer Science. But I'd say CMU gives plenty of options to make use of your CS or IS major.

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