CS will host a sophomore course advising event on Thursday January 19th from 5-6pm in the LL2 Atrium of the SEC. This is your last chance to get a Crimson Cart signed without your advisor.
We are happy you are considering CS as a concentration! Computer Science is open to everyone. For example, two thirds of CS 50 students did not have any CS background before joining Harvard, and many of our concentrators only take their first CS course in their sophomore year.
There are many aspects to computer science, and many ways to combine it with other interests, including the natural, life, and social sciences, humanities and more. For example, see senior theses on the interface of CS and Art, Biology (see also this), Economics (see also this), English, Environmental preservation, Government, Law, Mathematics, Neuroscience, Philosophy (see also this), Physics, Statistics, and Women and Gender Studies.
Some centers, activities and institutes affiliated with Computer Science include:
If you are interested in concentrating or doing a secondary in Computer Science, we highly recommend that you read our FAQ. Please also take a look at the list of our peer concentration advisors and consider reaching out to one of them for more personal information. We recommend all concentrators and CS-interested students at Harvard join the Harvard CS Undergraduate Piazza board. Finally, you might consider joining one of the many clubs and societies affiliated with computer science.
If you didn’t take CS 20, CS 50, or Linear Algebra your first year, it is absolutely not too late to concentrate in CS! However, in such a case we strongly recommend taking them your sophomore year if you are interested in concentrating in CS. (See our first year recommendations.) If you’ve taken these courses, or don’t need them, the following courses are good next steps: (The list below is not exhaustive, and there are other CS courses that are often taken by sophomores based on their interests and preparation; see our courses page for the SEAS 4-year plan as well as description of which courses count for which requirements.)
Please note that it is not required or even recommended that students take CS 61, CS 120 or 121, and Stat 110 all in one semester. Each of those courses has a relatively heavy workload, so most students choose to take exactly two of them at once. All these courses open doors to a few later courses, so take whichever one(s) whose follow-ups you think you’re more likely to want to pursue later. Several CS courses have a “homework zero” which is focused on the prerequisite knowledge. Doing this assignments before the term starts is a good way to gauge your readiness for the course, as well as seeing what topics you could use some brushing up on.
CS 61: Systems Programming and Machine Organization CS 61 is a great course on systems programming. This course fulfills both the programming 2 and systems tags. It’s reasonably common to take both CS 51 and CS 61.
CS 120: Introduction to Algorithms and their Limitations and/or CS 121: Introduction to Theoretical Computer Science Students who took CS 20 should be prepared for CS 120/121, but you can always check your mathematical preparation for them. Both courses fulfill the Computational Limitations tag and one formal reasoning tag for the CS concentration requirements; CS 120 also fulfills the Algorithms tag for basic (not honors) concentrations. See CS 120 Homework Zero and/or CS 121 Homework Zero (recommended to do before the term begins) to get a sense of whether your background is sufficient for these courses. See also this FAQ about the similarities and differences between CS 120, 121, and 124.
Stat 110: Probability is not a CS class, but probability is required for all concentrators. ES 150, offered in the spring, is an alternative, but most students choose Stat 110. Stat 100 (together with linear algebra and a programming course such as CS 50) is also good preparation for taking machine learning courses such as CS 181.
CS 51: Abstraction and Design in Computation CS 51 is a great course on abstraction in programming. This course fulfills the programming2 tag. It’s reasonably common to take both CS 51 and CS 61.
CS 124: Data Structures and Algorithms Students who took CS 20 should be prepared for CS 124, but you can always check your mathematical preparation for it. This course fullfils the Algorithms or Advanced Algorithms tag (and a formal reasoning tag) for the CS concentration requirements.