It looks like I’ll be entering the second half of my university career next term. Wow – time has definitely flew by quickly. It wasn’t that long ago that I was a frosh looking to find meaning in life… 
I suppose it’s about time that I start specializing in topics that I enjoy. After 3A I don’t have any real required courses so I have a multitude of options. Heck, even in 3A I only have 2 courses that I absolutely have to take (CS 341: Algorithms and CS 350: Operating Systems). That pretty much leaves ~18 slots to complete various degree requirements and whatnot. Woot.
From the beginning I knew I was going to lean heavily towards business. I finally formalized my plan change today and added the option in (it’s essentially a minor that isn’t a minor). I don’t know how much it really matters, but eh.
Anyway, for my 3A term I’ll likely be taking CS 348 (Introduction to Database Management), PSYCH 338 (Organizational Psychology) and BUS 352W (Introduction to Marketing Management) along with the two listed above. That looks like a pretty decent selection. 
I might make some changes depending on various factors of course.
After that… Well, there’s a number of courses that I can take. I guess I’ll break it down for future reference.
- BUS 362W (Building and Managing Products, Services and Brands) will likely be the last business course I’ll enroll in to fulfill a couple of requirements. It’s the successor to BUS 352W (I suppose that’s why the course number was changed) and the topic itself looks pretty interesting.
- ENGL 119 (Communications in Mathematics & Computer Science) and CS 492 (The Social Implications of Computing) are “required” courses for the business option. I don’t really have any further comments at this point.
- CS 370 is a prerequisite for a course I want to take. It appears to be a whole lot of math. I’m just hoping it’s more applied than theoretical.
- CS 488 (Introduction to Computer Graphics) is pretty much the course I’ve been looking forward to since my first term here at UW. Graphics has always been one of the few topics that *really* interest me. Indeed, I’ll probably try to learn a bit of OpenGL over the next few months.
- PHYS 121 and PHYS 122 (Mechanics and Waves 1/2) are pretty much filler courses to satisfy my degree’s breadth & depth requirements. I chose physics in part because I think I can apply a lot of it in, say, animation. My other alternative is to take a couple of astronomy courses, but eh…
- CS 490 (Information Systems Management) links together computer science and business. That’s all I need to say on that matter.
- CS 349 (User Interfaces) also looks to be a very entertaining course (especially since I wrote my last work report on application design…).
- Considering how much I’ve been lashing out at Facebook, Google, RockYou and others over the last couple weeks, it’s no surprise that CS 458 (Computer Security and Privacy) is on this list.
- CS 486 (Introduction to Artificial Intelligence) is pretty obvious. Evil robots ftw!
- I might take CS 448 (Database Systems Implementation) as a follow-up to CS 348 depending on whether I have room. We’ll see.
- Finally, I’ll probably take CS 343 (Concurrent and Parallel Programming) to round out my programming skills and to satiate my curiosity on developing for multiple cores (pretty useful considering the shift in CPU development over the last few years).
That’s a pretty comprehensive set of courses I think. It should give me a pretty solid foundation to build on in the future. 