Popular Majors for Aspiring Techies @ UBC
A Noobie’s Guide to the different tech-facing majors at UBC.
Welcome to the Noobies Guide, if you’re reading this, I assume you fall into one of these categories:
- You’re interested in tech and you are a current student at UBC
- You’re interested in tech and you are contemplating studying at UBC
Whichever category you happen to belong to, you’re interested and curious about entering the tech industry. And as you’ve been going about your studies, you might have suddenly been hit with this challenging and frightening question.
“What should I major in to enter the tech industry?”
It’s a decision that will impact the next four years of your life and potentially your entire career right? What’s the best choice to make here? What options are even out there? AHHHHHHHH.
👋 Heyo, I’m Jaehun, currently in my fifth year studying Computer Science at the University of British Columbia, and those wild thoughts you saw above were questions I first had when applying for my major.
As you can see, I was pretty stressed out trying to research and evaluate the available options to find what would be the best fit for me.
The difficulty came from the fact that there really wasn’t any consolidated information anywhere about these majors, so from the outside it was hard to even know where to start your research!
To prevent that sort of stress from ever happening to anyone else again, I’ve spent some time and research into compiling together a list of popular majors at UBC both relevant and applicable for entering the tech field.
I hope this will allow you to better understand all the available options and lead you to make the choice that is right for you!
Note: Do your own research too as things may change over time!
Computer Science 💻
A Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science (CPSC) is the most traditional and popular approach for students interested in software development.
What will I learn?
A Computer Science student’s core curriculum is focused around 3 branches:
- Software Engineering
- Computer Systems
- Algorithmic and Data Structure Theory
CPSC students also have reserved seats to any Computer Science courses (you get priority over non CPSC majors), and as such have a greater opportunity to register in upper level industry topics (Machine Learning, AI, Databases…etc) which are quite popular.
Computer Science is offered in both the faculties of Science and Arts. Depending on the faculty you choose, you will also have to follow the requisite faculty’s general course requirements. I have listed links to both below.
Note: Science faculty has a significantly greater intake of CPCS students over the arts faculty
There are also a number of Combined Major options in BSc where you can incorporate several different fields with computer science if you are interested in multiple fields. Example: people interested in biotech or health tech often do a combined major in CPSC and a life science major.
Personal opinion: I quite enjoyed the material I learned from my CPSC courses. I will mention that CPSC is a HUGE major at UBC (take a look at UBC’s enrollment statistics). As a result, there does tend to be less of a student body identity. I recommend applying to clubs and events in order to make connections with other CPSC students!
PS: For those that have already completed an undergrad degree, UBC also offers a 2 year accelerated Computer Science BCS program.
Computer Engineering 🚀
A Bachelor of Applied Science in Computer Engineering (CPEN) integrates certain aspects of computer science and electrical engineering with a focus on computer systems.
It’s an ideal choice for those interested in hardware or firmware development, as well as working with software that ties into hardware systems.
What will I learn?
By studying Computer Engineering you can expect to expand upon topics like:
- Microcontroller and Circuit Design
- Computer Hardware & Designing Computer Systems
- Systems and Signals
- Interactions between hardware and software
CPEN students can look forward to yearly project courses as well as capstone (a major project in which students form a team to create a prototype solution for a real client) in their final year.
These projects are known to be a ton of work, but they are also a fantastic way to apply class knowledge to create something, which I personally found lacking at times in CPSC.
CPEN students are able to take upper level CPSC courses with their elective space if they are interested. However, CPEN students will not get priority access to CPSC courses, and seats are often competitive for popular courses.
Finally, as a CPEN student, you are part of the engineering faculty, which is a very tight knit society at UBC. CPEN itself is also a much smaller program than CPSC, and as such, has a more closer community.
Business and Computer Science 👔
A Bachelor of Commerce degree in Business and Computer Science (BUCS) is a combined major degree in the UBC Commerce program (Sauder).
BUCS is attractive degree for students interested in the business roles and aspects of tech such as Product or Project Management, or those who don’t want to take the science breadth requirements.
What will I learn?
Through Business and Computer Science is that alongside your CS education, you can expect to learn fundamental business fields such as:
- Accounting
- Finance
- Commercial Law
- Marketing
- Various types of Management & Organized Behaviour
- Entrepreneurship
BUCS students will also gain access to Sauder network events, and students will gain a stronger emphasis on networking, presentation and social analysis (very important skills!).
BUCS students also have reserved seating for CPSC courses, so they are able to generally get into the CPSC courses they wish to take.
Tradeoffs
- There is significantly less flexibility in CPSC courses for BUCS students outside of required courses, as credits need to go towards fulfilling commerce requirements.
- BUCS students do not need to take MATH or STATS courses after first year. This may restrict those who may want to take more computationally intensive CPSC courses (i.e Machine Learning).
- Courses are more expensive for students in the Commerce faculty (this is actually a Canada wide thing, not entirely sure why).
BUCS is another fairly small major, and as such have a very tight knit social group and students often see each other in the same classes as they share the same standard time table from first year.
Cognitive Systems ⚙️
A BSc degree in Cognitive Systems (COGS) is a multi-disciplinary major with 5 different streams, one of which is the CS oriented Computational Intelligence and Design stream.
What will I learn?
COGS students combines these four disciplines:
- Psychology
- Philosophy
- Linguistics
- Computer Science
With a broad perspective in these fields, COGS students can expect to be well versed in topics like: cognition, computation, creativity, information, language, perception, rationality and intelligent systems.
These can be applicable to CPSC topics such as AI, Human Computer Interaction, Programming Language Theory and Computational Linguistics to name a few.
Because of this, COGS could be an attractive major for those wishing to pursue a specific field of research in Computer Science, especially in combination with other disciplines.
Finally, similarly to BUCS, a COGS student will get access to reserved seats in CPSC courses, and second year MATH and STATS courses are not part of their degree requirements.
The Conclusion
So, there are some popular options for majors for tech inclined students. If none of these caught your interest, I’ll also give a mention to these other majors:
- Statistics, Math or Mathematical Sciences for students more interested in pure science and computation,
- Mechanical and Electrical Engineering for more hands on application,
- Engineering Physics if you want to dabble in everything (combines Physics, Electrical, Mechanical and Computer Engineering)
- Business Technology Management for tech oriented business analytical roles.
I’d like to emphasize that at the end of the day, your major selection is simply one opportunity towards entering the tech industry.
There are countless examples of people that studied completely irrelevant topics at university and still found success after in the tech world.
With this I hope with this you will be able to go out and select your major with confidence!
Psst! If you are in need of some technical experience, hackathons are a great way to create a project with like minded friends and UBC has several clubs that run hackathons throughout the school year.
I’m a member of one of these clubs, nwPlus who just so happen to be running a beginner friendly hackathon Dec 5–6, 2020! Do check out if you’re interested!
— Words by Jaehun Song, 2020/2021 nwPlus Logistics Coordinator
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Thanks to those that helped me write this article: David Kang, Victoria Provenzano, Elaine Au Yang, Tracy Wong, Dara Wong, Ford Atwater, Joice Tang, Victoria Kim, Rebecca Xie, Vincent Chiang.
