CS - why is not an engineering degree?

[ali_dada]

If you look into University program map for software engineering at Lakehead University or UOIT, you will notice that almost all courses taken in software engineering are taken in computer science as well.

Fine, there are a few electrical/electronics courses and 1-2 physics and math courses but the program related courses are the same.

My question is, given the similarity, won't be more beneficial for schools offering CS to simply add the courses required for engineering into the CS program and thus give out an engineering degree for CS as well?

What are your opinions?

[jbking]

I can see the logic of having a software engineering option in a Computer Science department, sure. This could be coordinated with the Engineering faculty and voila, which Waterloo has I believe.

At the same time, can you claim that all of Computer Science fits under the software engineering umbrella? I don't think so.


You are also generally talking about a cross-faculty designation in a sense, e.g. could someone studying Chemistry get a Chemical Engineering degree would be the analagous idea, which can involve some politics back and forth.

Personally, I'm happy with my double Honor's Bachelor's of Mathematics degree name while those in Engineering would have an Honor's Bachelor's of Applied Sciences generally.

[Tony]

Engineering has more requirements to it -- such as [url=http://compsci.ca/blog/chemistry-for-software-engineers/]a chemistry course[/b], which CS students might not be happy about.

While there might be a lot of the overlap at LU or UOIT, other Universities (I'm thinking Waterloo from experience) make the two programs much more distinct.

If you don't have much preferences towards either -- you might as well go SoftEng for the ring; but those are (supposed to be) two different majors.