As you might know I’m working on my PhD at Stanford, and one of my favorite parts is taking courses. For this second year I need to follow the new foundation and breadth requirements which in practice means taking a course a quarter, with each course chosen from one of four areas. For the fall quarter I took Riana Pfefferkorn and Alex Stamos’ Hacklab: Introduction to Cybersecurity, which I thoroughly enjoyed and learned a lot, especially about the legal side. I’m especially thankful to Danny Zhang, my excellent lab RA who had a lot of patience as I struggled with the difference between a search warrant and civil sanctions!
That satisfied the “People and Society” section of the requirements, but means I need to pick a course from one of the other three sections for the upcoming winter quarter. You might think this would be simple, but as any Googler can tell you, the more technically advanced the organization the worse the internal search tools are. The requirements page just has a bare list of course numbers, with no descriptions or links, and the enrollment tool is so basic that you have to put a space between the letters and the numbers of the course ID (“CS 243” instead of “CS243”) before it can find them, so it’s not even just a case of copying and pasting. To add to the complexity, many of the courses aren’t offered this coming quarter, so just figuring out what my viable options are was hard. I thought about writing a script to scrape the results, given a set of course numbers, but decided to do it manually in the end.
This will be a *very* niche post, but since there are around 100 other second year Stanford CS PhD students facing the same search problem, I thought I’d post my notes here in case they’ll be helpful. I make no guarantees about the accuracy of these results, I may well have fat-fingered some search terms, but let me know if you spot a mistake. I’ve indexed all 2xx and 3xx level courses in the first three breadth sections (since I already had the fourth covered), and I didn’t check 1xx because they tend to be more foundational. For what it’s worth, I’m most excited about CS 224N – Natural Language Processing with Deep Learning, and hope I can get signed up once enrollment opens.
2xx/3xx Breadth Courses Available Winter 2024
- CS 205L – Continuous Mathematical Methods with an Emphasis on Machine Learning, Tuesday/Thursday
- CS 212 – Operating Systems and Systems Programming, Monday/Wednesday
- CS 223A – Introduction to Robotics, Monday/Wednesday
- CS 224N – Natural Language Processing with Deep Learning, Tuesday/Thursday
- CS 228 – Probabilistic Graphical Models: Principles and Techniques, Tuesday/Thursday
- CS 229 – Machine Learning, Monday/Wednesday
- CS 233 – Geometric and Topological Data Analysis, Monday/Wednesday
- CS 237B – Principles of Robot Autonomy II, Monday/Wednesday
- CS 243 – Program Analysis and Optimizations, Monday/Wednesday
- CS 254 – Computational Complexity, Monday/Wednesday
- CS 255 – Introduction to Cryptography, Monday/Wednesday
- CS 256 – Algorithmic Fairness, Tuesday/Thursday
- CS 246 – Mining Massive Data Sets, Tuesday/Thursday
- CS 249I – The Modern Internet, Monday/Wednesday
- CS 348I – Computer Graphics in the Era of AI, Tuesday/Thursday
- EE 364A – Convex Optimization I, Tuesday/Thursday
- CS 369O – Optimization Algorithms, Tuesday/Thursday
2xx/3xx Courses Not Offered for Winter 2024
- CS 221
- CS 227
- CS 230
- CS 231
- CS 234
- CS 236
- CS 240
- CS 242
- CS 244
- CS 245
- CS 250
- CS 251
- CS 257
- CS 258
- CS 259
- CS 261
- CS 263
- CS 265
- CS 269
- CS 271
- CS 272
- CS 273
- CS 274
- CS 279
- CS 281
- CS 316
- CS 324
- CS 326
- CS 328
- CS 329D
- CS 329H
- CS 329X
- CS 330
- CS 331
- CS 332
- CS 333
- CS 334
- CS 354
- CS 355
- CS 356
- CS 358
- CS 359
- CS 371
- CS 373
- EE 282
Pete Warden's blog 
Thanks for writing this. I’ve been considering going back to school to learn more CS (am a EE by education). While I don’t know when I’ll do it, this list helps me “prepare” by taking some of this reading up independently, so thank you!