I did not know what Computer Science in Business Administration was until I got to USC, in fact, I was never interested in business to begin with until I got here. Although I was admitted as a CS major, a couple of the first friends I made here in Viterbi were CSBA majors. It was not until the third week of school on the last day we were able to add/drop courses that I had changed my major and dropped my Calculus III course (required for CS, not CSBA), replacing it with Applied Business Statistics. Perhaps one of the best decisions I had made was making that change, not just because I was doing poorly in Calc III, but also because I wanted to take a business curriculum from one of the top business schools in the states and expand my opportunities beyond CS into fields like Product Management and Data Science. This is not to say that one cannot go into those careers without a CSBA degree, but the design of the major is best for equipping those skills needed and preparing for those careers.
What CSBA ACTUALLY Is
I best explain CSBA to people not as a double major (because it isn’t), but a half major: 30 units of CS courses, 36 units of Business Administration taken in the Marshall School of Business. It is essentially the best of both worlds where you possess the technical skills you gain from taking CS courses, but also the business decision-making, communication, networking, and leadership skills you gain from taking business courses. This way, in an applied business or engineering environment, you can make proper judgments based on what is expected of you and measure how realistic a certain task is based on given parameters (i.e. timeline, resources, etc.) without having to potentially kill yourself trying to figure something out that was doomed to be impossible and unrealistic from the start. The business portion also equips you with leadership skills, opening up more opportunities for seniority positions.
What I Hope to Gain from CSBA
Like how I did not know what CSBA was until I had first got here, I also did not know about product management and would simply bring it up in conversation pretending like I knew what it was. It is essentially in the name, the management of a product, from planning and developing to launching, specifically in a CS context. I like to compare it to one of my favorite shows about CS, Silicon Valley (you can watch it on HBO Max) as the premise of that entire show is essentially product management and dealing with CS in an applied business setting. Data Science is also prominent to me as my BUAD-310 course, which does a great job of preparing students for real life data analysis in business settings, and can range anywhere from basic financial statistics to AI and machine learning development. I have always been good with numbers, which is why I still want CS and engineering principles to be prominent in my career. CSBA does a good job of merging the bridge between technical and business.
In short, CSBA quite literally is the best of both worlds. It allows you to engage with a diverse range of people from the business world and engineering world and use their experiences to your own advantage. Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi stated at a speaker event that the best engineers are those concerned with business problems, and CSBA teaches you about all of the problems to be concerned of. I have met some of the best and smartest, most qualified people from this major on both ends, and to be able to work with them regularly expands my mindset and skills that I can take to my grave, no matter what my career path will look like in the future.
