It is the job of computer scientists to understand the hardware, software and the interfaces to computing devices that make all of these applications possible. Students who major in computer science take a rigorous set of courses. They begin their studies with programming, followed by the study of concepts of how data is represented and the algorithms that process the data.
Students explore the constructs of programming languages and the components of system software.
They study the processing capabilities of various computer architectures. They gain an understanding of computing as a system, and the interrelationships between the hardware, system software and the application software used to process information. The computer science major at UW Oshkosh is software oriented. This is different than computer engineering curricula, which empasize hardware, and information systems curricula, which focus on commercial applications of computers.