> Is this typical for CS undergraduate degrees because you get to pick your own classes?
Do an experiment: pick a handful of intern applicant resumes, look at their degree and then look at what the uni requires to get that degree. In the US, you will find often that there are ABET accredited and non-accreddited versions of the same degree. What you are looking at is commonly required for ABET but often avoided when possible. Or in the case of one person, I've found that the college they claim to have studied at doesn't have any such degree program.
Reminds me of a conversation with a new hire that was re-orged onto my team, and a machine learning engineer on another team. She said "Ah, you are lucky to join his team this way; they are all the people who took those hard classes like Operating Systems and said 'more please' instead of quickly dropping the course. Their interview process is very hard."
It's also worth remembering that the US BS program is not like Germany's old Diplom system. It's not 2 years of gen ed then 3 years of only computer science. It's 4 years total and entirely possible for a student to study SQL for one semester two years ago and never touch it again as part of coursework, if they took databases early and don't have a school job.
Do an experiment: pick a handful of intern applicant resumes, look at their degree and then look at what the uni requires to get that degree. In the US, you will find often that there are ABET accredited and non-accreddited versions of the same degree. What you are looking at is commonly required for ABET but often avoided when possible. Or in the case of one person, I've found that the college they claim to have studied at doesn't have any such degree program.
Reminds me of a conversation with a new hire that was re-orged onto my team, and a machine learning engineer on another team. She said "Ah, you are lucky to join his team this way; they are all the people who took those hard classes like Operating Systems and said 'more please' instead of quickly dropping the course. Their interview process is very hard."
It's also worth remembering that the US BS program is not like Germany's old Diplom system. It's not 2 years of gen ed then 3 years of only computer science. It's 4 years total and entirely possible for a student to study SQL for one semester two years ago and never touch it again as part of coursework, if they took databases early and don't have a school job.