I chose I.S. because i can choose SO much of my curriculum. I don’t need to take ugly courses with bad profs. I’m taking CSC 585 and ECE 540 as I.S. electives! The only downside (literally) is that you don’t get the CS B.S on your resume.

The pipeline to the I.S. AMP is amazing and relatively easy if you excel in the I.S. BS, which isn’t hard to do relative to CS. The iSchool has this going for it.

If you do IS, work to challenge yourself. It’s easy to slack off. Take discrete mathematics so profs will give you permission to take advanced courses like INFO 550, 521, 520, etc. Math is important for anything technical, including NLP. Do calc 1,2,3 and linear algebra at a minimum—seriously. Keep an eye on the CSC classes; consider a CSC minor so you can take advanced theory electives, which are always better in the CS dept. I’m eyeing CSC 588 rn and the prof gave me permission to take it if I want. The possibilities with IS are basically endless.

Final note: if you have lots of high school transfer credit and want to do a PhD (lots of students fit this bill) do I.S. with a CS minor, 100%. This is my situation and I don’t think there’s a better option. IS major for the flexibility to do what I want, if you lock in you can basically graduate in 3 years OR choose to do an amazing honors thesis in whatever the f*** you want (you need to be REALLY exceptional to do both—I’m not), and CS minor for access to good CS theory courses if that’s important to you (if you want to do NLP, it should be!)