Computing Science & Business Administration
Information for Prospective Students
Why study Computing Science and Business Administration?
Saint Mary’s Computing Science and Business Administration program is an interdisciplinary four-year degree that combines computing science courses, taught in the Department of Mathematics and Computing Science, with a selection of courses taught in the Sobey School of Business.
This program is designed to meet the increasing demand for people with solid technical knowledge of computing science and IT who also understand how to apply this technology to business problems. It is ideal if you plan to lead IT-related projects or advance to high management positions in IT-related companies.
The Program provides entry into co-op if progression requirements are satisfied. The list of requirements for acceptance into the Co-operative Education Program can be found here.
Navigate your BSc in Computing Science and Business Administration
The Faculty of Science has developed several tools to help science students understand course prerequisites and choose courses:
If you have questions about course selection or your major, the Science Advising Centre can help.
College or university?
Computing Science and Business Administration programs at colleges typically teach computing languages and business principles in demand at the time of instruction. At Saint Mary’s, we go beyond that: our students learn these skills, plus the foundational principles that tie programs and computing systems together. This approach gives our students the ability to learn new languages as they develop in the future; it also affords them the opportunity to work within a much broader range of programs and software after graduation.
The Saint Mary’s approach
With an average class size of 60 students per class in first-year courses and ten to 20 in upper-year courses, our students form easy connections with their professors and each other. This supportive atmosphere encourages students to diversify their education through study abroad, co-op, or undergraduate research opportunities. Our students also regularly participate in regional computer programming “hackathons” and business case competitions—experiences highly valued by future employers.
Sample courses offered:
- Database Programming: This course covers topics such as modelling data to meet organizational requirements, programming business applications on a current database management platform, the SQL command language, and managing data security and database administration. It also includes topics on hierarchical, distributed, and object-oriented databases.
- Communications, Networks, and Security: This course is an introduction to computer network hardware and software required for small, medium and large enterprises. Topics include: client-server and cloud architectures, fundamental concepts of wireless networks, TCP/IP networks, and wide-area networks. Security topics such as identifying networked enterprise threats and security technologies for the purposes of secure communications, storage, and retrieval are also covered.
- Strategic Management: This is a “capstone” course in which students utilize all the business disciplines to identify, diagnose, and recommend appropriate action for real managerial problems. An objective of this course is to provide students with a better understanding of the complexity and interrelationship of modern managerial decision-making.
- Artificial Intelligence: Students will consider philosophical, mathematical, experimental, and implementation aspects of such topics as problem solving, searching, game playing, genetic algorithms, learning, neutral networks, natural language processing, vision, knowledge representation, logic, expert systems, reasoning under uncertainty, fuzzy sets, planning, and robotics.
Future career opportunities:
- Systems/Data Analyst
- IT Consultant and Manager
- Website Developer
- Software Engineer or Developer
- Information Security Officer
- IT Project Manager
- User-experience Designer
- Data Scientist
- AI Specialist