Computer Science

Computer science is an exciting and challenging field with impact on much of modern life. Computer scientists craft the technologies enabling the digital devices used every day; developing the large-scale software powering business and industry, advancing the computational techniques and writing the software scientists use to identify and analyze patterns in the behavior of social groups and human behavior in social networks and the applications humanists and linguists use to research language development. Many new applications of computing technology remain to be discovered and computing will be at the heart of future revolutions in business, science and society. Students who study computer science now will be at the forefront of those important advances.

Computer science is concerned with how computers are constructed, how they are used to store and process data, used in problem-solving and used to assess the quality of solutions to problems.

Creating software for a variety of users is requires understanding how software interacts with the hardware on which it runs. Computer science goes well beyond the machine to the study of how people interact with the technologies around them. Applications of computer science reach far and wide.

Career Possibilities

Computer science graduates from CU-Boulder are engaged in a variety of jobs with organizations worldwide in fields such as communications, finance, publishing and research. They are software developers, teachers, writers, doctors, lawyers, scientists, military leaders and entrepreneurs. Many computer science graduates lead highly successful companies that they themselves have founded.

Facilities, Programs and Opportunities

The Department of Computer Science supports its own domain (www.colorado.edu/cs) and a modern computing infrastructure facilitating its research and educational missions. The department has a variety of computing facilities for use by faculty, staff and students including general purpose computing labs provided by the university, additional instructional labs and administrative computing resources provided by the department and specialized labs for individual research groups. The variety of computing resources provides students the opportunity to learn about and use cutting-edge equipment and software.

The Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP) offers students a chance to work alongside a faculty sponsor on original research. Students learn to write proposals, conduct research, pursue creative work, analyze data and present the results. For more information, call UROP at 303-492-2596 or visit enrichment.colorado.edu/urop.

The department also provides students networking opportunities throughout the year with companies offering paid internships. CU’s location near Boulder’s tech start-up community, national research labs and traditional tech companies such as Google, IBM, Oracle and Microsoft, gives students with computer science skills many employment opportunities while earning their degrees. 

The course code for this program is CSCI.