Computer Science Minor (Review 2)

Written by Lalit Saini M, B.Tech 3rd year (July 2021)

My decision to pursue the CSE minor was driven entirely by a strong desire to understand the core CS concepts. Since the minor courses will not affect the major CPI, it was an excellent opportunity to enjoy the content without stressing about grades.

CSE department offers some good courses for the minor. The courses are not fixed, though. To complete the minor degree, one has to complete 30 credits, out of which four courses should be of M tag and the last one can of M tag or any other CS department elective. I took four minor courses and one CSE elective.

In my third semester, I took CS228-Logic for CS. It is a good course. The course doesn’t have any coding. The course starts with formally defining logic, talking about soundness and completeness of propositional logic. You will get to know about first-order logic for languages and monadic second-order logic. It ends with temporal logic and finite state automata theory. This course helped me in Digital System, which is a core course in elec. Both the courses share some common topics.

In the fourth semester, I took CS213-Data Structures and algorithms. The course focused on complexity calculations, different algorithms, and useful data structures. The major takeaway from this course should be the complexity analysis of an algorithm. This will improve your coding style a lot. This course helps in the internship/placement process.

Apart from this, I took one elective, CS663-Fundamentals of digital image processing. The course provided multiple classic image processing algorithms. Digital image processing has a wide application in the EE domain. It is nothing but an application of digital signal processing. In the fifth semester, I took CS224-Computer Networks. The course provided fundamentals of the OSI model of the internet. The course will help you understand the movement of a data packet from your pc to your favourite website server.

In the sixth semester, I took CS347-Operating Systems. If you want to be a software developer, this is a must-do course, in my opinion. The course will give you insights into process virtualization, memory virtualization, concurrency, and many OS essentials.

CSE minor attracts a lot of students. One can expect the cut-off to be above 9. To get top grades, one has to put in a decent amount of effort. Every semester 2-4 courses are offered. It helps to choose courses according to interest. Make sure to keep your CPI high so that you can choose courses according to interest, not by the compulsion to complete the minor. Without an inclination towards the content, a course can become fairly complex to follow.